The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
The cherry on top of the shitshow that was this week is that my new, ridiculously overpriced PS5 Pro that I wasn’t even completely sure I wanted came out of its box tonight, and … it’s bricked. Three different known-good HDMI cables and two known-good power cords later plus the two out of the box, it’ll turn on but absolutely will not output a signal. So I’m returning it, and I’m not particularly interested in an exchange. I’m just getting my money back.
I find myself weirdly relieved.
Parent-teacher conferences at my kid’s school today, which ate up most of my evening, and then I had two tests and an assignment to write for tomorrow, and I’m contemplating how long I’m going to wait until I take this big bastard out of its box:
… so, I have spent money unwisely, but fuck it, I get to give the original PS5 to my son and get some good dad points, and fuck it, the world’s ending so I may as well buy useless shit, right?
More tomorrow.
I need all of you to know something very important: never once in my life, nay, never once in the entire history of the human race, have the Democrats lost a Presidential election the day after I got a Platinum trophy in a PS5 game. It hasn’t happened once.
That is as optimistic as I intend to get. I was burned hard by 2016, as many of you were, and I’m refusing to hope, like, at all right now. I intend to go into tomorrow night being surprised by even the slightest scrap of good news. I can’t afford hope right now. I just can’t.
Minerva Grey asked me this in comments yesterday:
I am curious and a bit afraid to ask because I don’t want to run the risk of being talked into it, but how is watching election returns not detrimental to mental health? It strikes me as doomscolling and hopescrolling combined, and the likelihood of a definitive answer in the wee hours of Wednesday morning (at least on the U.S. east coast) seems highly unlikely.
First, let me be as clear as I can that, while I will be either on my couch or at my desk tomorrow, likely scrolling and reloading on my phone, my iPad, and a laptop simultaneously while watching one or more cable stations, that is because I am insane, in a way entirely different from my actual diagnosed mental illness. I mainline the news during elections, presidential and midterm. I have been like this since I was a teenager, and at 48 I’m not interested in swapping out those particular stripes. I will likely be up very late tomorrow night, and when I finally go to bed it will only be so I can go to sleep and open the news right the hell back up. For me, not throwing myself into as many news sources as I possibly can during that time is what’s going to drive me crazy. I can’t ignore an event of this magnitude. If you can, and if that will help you get through the next 48 hours, I enthusiastically recommend you turn absolutely everything off and do whatever you need to do. I took personal days tomorrow and Wednesday because I know myself and I don’t need to be around my students while I’m stressing this hard. But not watching everything as it comes in is not going to help me.
And while I really don’t want to make any predictions, I actually do think we’re going to have an answer tomorrow night, if not perhaps in the wee hours of the morning, or at the very least we’re going to have some results that point rather conclusively at one answer rather than another. I think when I do go to bed I will have a pretty strong idea of who the winner is going to be, and while there will absolutely be all sorts of litigation afterward, I don’t think it’s going to go much of anywhere.
Of course, I know nothing about politics, and I am wrong all the time, so you don’t need to pay too much attention to that last paragraph, and if we lose via court shenanigans the thing that happens next, where I kill God and leave his body on the steps of the Supreme Court, has absolutely nothing to do with me having made a prediction that some heavenly being, I’m not specifying which one, decided to make cataclysmically wrong, probably out of pure spite.
(I’m taking some refuge in the fact that Joe Biden is President right now, and I’m reminded of something Andrew Jackson once said about another Chief Justice named John: “John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”)
I have done a good job of avoiding both doomscrolling and hopescrolling, because both of them are dangerous to my mental health. I have my lesson plans ready for tomorrow; I am off Tuesday and Wednesday, because no one deserves me, and hopefully the world is still here on Thursday for me to return to work, but I make no Goddamned guarantees, and if I am still a lunatic, I will stay home for a third day in a row.
I have been working on Platinuming Black Myth Wukong all day today and once I am done with that I have a lot of housecleaning, a bunch of books and Dragon Age: Veilguard on deck. I have plenty to keep me from thinking until it’s time to inject cable news into my veins for 24 hours straight on Tuesday night.
God help us all.
I have two things I want to review, but I don’t have the patience to do a full-length review of either of them, so you should fully expect that the actual writing in this post will take up less space than the pictures. Short version: buy both of these things!
The Fury of the Gods, by John Gwynne, is the third and concluding volume of his Bloodsworn trilogy, and as luck would have it I finished the book I was reading the day it showed up so I was able to dive right into it. I have ten of Gwynne’s books, all read over the last couple of years, and Bloodsworn is definitely his best series, but I’d need to reread the whole trilogy to tell you for sure if Fury of the Gods is my favorite of his books or not. One way or another, this showcases everything Gwynne is best at: a deeply Norse-inflected world, with very cool magic and absolutely brutal action, that starts off with all of the gods dead and gone and ends with them very much neither of those two things. The last hundred and fifty pages of Fury is one long battle scene. It’s amazing. His character work remains exceptional and the way this series swaps POVs between both sides of the major conflict in the book is great; I think it’s fair to say that there’s a bad-guy side but everyone’s reasons for fighting the way they do make sense and damn near everyone was interesting.
Also, my God, the covers for these books are remarkable.
He’s also doing this thing in this series where men and women exist in a society of complete equality and yet he never bothers to draw attention to it. There’s a lot of stuff in The Bloodsworn that is drawn from Norse/Viking culture, including the alphabet, but he sets aside historical accuracy whenever he feels like it, and gender differences are one of those places. If you’re looking for woman warrior characters (and everyone in these books is a warrior), you need look no further.
I finished Black Myth Wukong yesterday, finally, and I’m playing at least partially through it again because this is one of those games where I feel like I need the Platinum trophy and there’s no way to do that in one play through. This game is Chinese the same way that The Bloodsworn is Norse; it’s more inspired by myth and legend than historical reality, and frankly if you’re not already a student of Chinese culture (and I’m very much not) there’s a lot in this story that’s going to leave you behind. It’s apparently a video game version of Journey to the West, one of the five Classical Chinese novels, and … uh, that’s all I know about the five Classical Chinese novels? All I know is the story in lots of places makes no sense at all to my American ass but that doesn’t matter even a tiny bit because monkey man hit monster with stick.
Seriously, outside of the Nioh series this may be my favorite non-Fromsoft Soulslike (and anyone who claims it’s not a Soulslike but an “action RPG” should be shunned; this is absolutely a Soulslike) and I think I might like it more than I liked Nioh 1 anyway. There are some technical issues; I’m still hoping for an optimization patch, and there’s a stuttering issue that gets worse the longer you go without either restarting your PS5 or actually closing the game out and reopening it, but beyond that? No gripes. You’d think that build variation would be a problem given that you’re limited to the staff as your weapon, but 1) it doesn’t matter because the staff is hugely fun and 2) there are enough different stances and other ways to set up your build that there are going to be a million ways to approach any situation anyway. I talked about the difficulty yesterday; I’d say this hits the sweet spot of being difficult but fair pretty precisely, but people who haven’t been mainlining Souls games for years like I have may want to gird their loins. I hear there’s a big DLC coming eventually and I’m going to buy it the second I hear about it.
I damn near forgot to post today, what with doing all sorts of accident-related adulting early in the day, my son having a friend over for the whole afternoon, and then a Trunk & Treat at Hogwarts filling up my evening. I also managed to squeeze in some reading, my Arabic, and finally putting Black Myth: Wukong to bed, although I think I’m going to play for a bit longer to get the platinum on it. I’ll probably do a full review, but the short version is “It’s pretty fucking awesome and you should play it.” That said, the reports of insane difficulty on the final boss and the final optional boss are a little overstated. Erlang took maybe half an hour and The Great Sage’s Broken Shell maybe an hour, neither of which qualifies as enormous difficulty in my book, especially since the strategies needed became clear pretty quickly and it was just a matter of putting everything together.
Just, y’know, forgot the website until 9:00. Sorry!
Let’s see: I spent a couple of hours hunting down bosses in Black Myth Wukong’s final level, which inexplicably transitions into an open world map but doesn’t actually provide you with a map, meaning such concerns as “north” and “south” become way more complicated than they ought to be. We went out to dinner at a local Italian place, the one with the really good bread, although I’m starting to suspect that they’re using genuinely stellar bread to cover up for mediocre entrees. We finally took down the utterly terrible curtains that have been hanging in our dining room since we bought the house and replaced them, and the hardware, with something not filthy and disgusting, and we went and bought paint for the entryway to the house, a decision that I think we’re going to live to regret, but my wife thinks otherwise, and she’s usually right about these things.
I don’t feel like that gets me to 9:00 PM, and I’m not sure where the several other hours of the day have gone, and I’m rather disturbed by my inability to account for, like, half the day. The boy is at a lock-in at school right now (I have done one of these during my career, and I will never do another) and you would think having the house to ourselves would lead to something exciting, but instead we’re going to watch one (1) episode of Great British Baking Show and then go to bed.
Adulthood’s exciting, innit?
So: today I spent the morning reading a book, cover to cover, that I hated so much I might hate-review it and yet I couldn’t put it down, and then I spent a good chunk of the evening playing a game to the point where my wrists hurt, which hasn’t happened in a very long time, and I’m not sure if I like the game.
So, to be clear, today has been a day absolutely stuffed with bad decisions and I strongly recommend you pay no attention to anything I think, forever.
Typing hurts, so we’re gonna call it a night early, my apologies. I’ll wear my brace tonight and see if I can’t complain about the shitty book tomorrow.
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