The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Slept until ten this morning, which is the first time I’ve done that in a while, then spent the whole day reading and pushing through Veilguard, which I’m bound and determined to finish before Christmas. Now I’m on the couch, cat in my lap, watching British people make pottery.
Not bad for the first day of break.
One random thought tonight, as it has been a tremendously sleepy Saturday and I’ve pretty much just been lazing about and reading and playing video games all day and have no thinks left: I have been tremendously enjoying Dragon Age: Veilguard, which was a great weight off of my shoulders after quitting partway through the last installment, but at 55 hours in I would very much like to put it to bed now, thanks. I just went through the trophies for the game and there appear to be five or six more story chapters, which just makes me even more tired.
It’s my own fault; if I wasn’t such a blasted completist in this type of game I could probably be done with it by now, and the worst thing is that I know I missed one– and only one– trophy, necessitating an eventual second play through. I was probably going to do that anyway to see how a bunch of different story decisions work when I make them the other way, but now I have to, at least for certain values of “have to” involving being an obsessive dork.
God, it’s good there aren’t any real problems in the world, right?
God pissed in my face last night, by allowing me to briefly believe that there was either a second DLC or an actual by-God sequel to Elden Ring coming in 2025. The phrase co-op multiplayer roguelite does not make me happy, God damn it, and while it might still be something I play it is absolutely not something I want, and when you start off by getting me all sloppy about the idea of a surprise reveal of a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, anything other than “this is a sequel or another big DLC” is going to be a letdown.
Par for the Goddamned course for 2024, of course, which just in the last 24 hours has also featured a so-far underwhelming Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre collaboration and The Cure deciding to release a second version of their latest album with an entire live album attached to it, when the original album has only been out for a few weeks. The whole world is making me stabbity, is what I’m saying here.
(The Cure’s album-plus-concert is only $9.99, so I bought it anyway, but … if you’re gonna sell it for just ten fucking bucks, why not release the concert separately? I don’t need another version of the original album even if they’re both digital and technically not taking up any space anywhere!)
Also while I’m bitching I refuse to accept Astro Bot as Game of The Year. Yes, I know I haven’t played it. I don’t care if that’s unreasonable. I say no and that’s the end of it.
I feel like I should end that with some good news, and the truth is I’m not even in that bad of a mood; other than Tuesday, which was genuinely awful, this wasn’t that bad of a week. I really need to finish up my Christmas shopping this weekend, because … I’m not going to go into a rant about shopping, but I don’t know how retail stores expect me to avoid Amazon if they don’t ever have anything I’m looking for. I went to Target earlier and couldn’t find tape. Or, at least, I could only find the kind that’s already on the little plastic shell and not refills for my tape dispenser on my desk at work, which is what I wanted.
Damn it that’s bitching again. Finishing Christmas shopping! That’s something I need to do. I need more/better stuff for my wife and my son and maybe something for my sister-in-law. Everybody else is done.
Yeah. Christmas shopping and books and then five days until Winter Break. I can do this. Who else do you need to shop for?
Big Bastard 2: The Rebastarding appears to be working just fine, thanks; I have come up with one thing that might possibly have affected the previous console’s ability to work beyond “this shit is broken,” but to hell with it, FedEx has it already. I need to move it to where it’s actually going to live, but the original PS5 is still there since I wasn’t about to start really rearranging things until I was certain this one worked.
Meanwhile, it’s 6:30 and pitch fucking black outside, and mentally I’m like WAIT NO HOW THE HELL IS IT BEDTIME THERE’S MORE WEEKEND LEFT, and god, do I hate Daylight Savings Time. Saving Time. Whatever the fuck it’s called. I hate it being fucking dark at 6:30 in the evening during the winter and I hate it being light at 10:30 during the summer and time is bullshit.
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.