Tag: writing

Burn the whole technology to the ground

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.

This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.

I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.

Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.

There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.

Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.

Some Sunday odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.

It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.

Today? Dead quiet.

We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.

I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.

This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.

After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.

You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?

And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.

On rare books, Mark Twain, and penises

On By Luther M. SilerIn art, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I am not quite halfway through with Ron Chernow’s 1200-page biography of Mark Twain, so it would be unfair to call this a “review” per se, but … c’mon. It’s a book by one of America’s preeminent historians about very likely the most important writer ever born on American soil. I’ve already read and loved his biographies of Hamilton and Washington, and I’ll get to the Grant and Rockefeller books sooner or later. There’s no universe where this isn’t a magnificent book, and it’s not like there’s going to be any plot twists in the last five hundred pages. This is a great biography already and it’s enormously unlikely I’m going to encounter anything that will change my mind– and if I do, it’ll change my mind about Mark Twain, and not about Chernow’s book about him.

All that said, I learned something today, and I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more information about it, and I need to share this information with you.

If you buy one of the approximately one billion available editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that include the original engravings, you will encounter at some point this image of Huck, his Uncle Silas, and his Aunt Sally:

You will note the arrow pointing just underneath Uncle Silas’ crotch, and you will note the straight line of his pants. You may also note the look on Aunt Sally’s face, which I feel deserves more attention in general.

This is not the image that was in the first printing of the book. That image looked like this, known as the “curved fly” engraving:

See that curved line? That’s the original engraving by E.W. Kemble, whose name you’ll note in the lower right. Twain selected Kemble himself, and presumably did not vet this image of Uncle Silas for a single slightly, barely bulgey line in his pants.

After a few hundred copies of the first edition were printed, a salesman noticed that someone had somehow changed the engraving to … well, this:

That right there, folks, is Uncle Silas’ cock, although it appears to be growing out of his leg rather than in the usual location. Maybe that has something to do with the look on Aunt Sally’s face, I dunno. Maybe dicks were different in 1884. You’ll note that said penis is pointed directly at Huck, which isn’t relevant to the story but adds an extra little twist of creepy to it.

Anyway, the edition was very speedily recalled, and the offending pages destroyed, although an unknown number of copies remained in the wild. A book with the offending penis in it has never made it to auction or been sold publicly, and it’s not known how many might be out there. (Check out this absolutely amazing contemporary article about the controversy from New York World. The euphemisms. My God, the nineteenth-century euphemisms.)

The University of Virginia has at least one copy of the edition with the penis, which is where the image came from. They had to redo the engraving for the rest of the no-longer-“first” edition, and the new version of the engraving had a straight fly.

Copies of the “curved fly” edition (without the penis) go for lots and lots of money. My favorite detail about that $15,000 listing? Shipping is $4.00 and they accept returns within thirty days.

The person who altered the engraving was never identified.

Ow

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

In retrospect, I should have kept the tooth, or at least gotten a picture of it. I did ask to see it, and I was surprised at how small it was for some reason. One would think I would know how big my own teeth are! I do not.

That said, despite finding out that I was also scheduled for a filling on a tooth that I had thought the doc said we were just going to keep an eye on, the procedure was quick and more or less completely painless. I want to say something like “the shots were the worst part,” but the shots weren’t even enough to qualify as bad, since they start with numbing gel anyway, so I barely felt them. The drilling for the filling (heh) seemed like it took less than a minute. There’s been no pain post-removal, at least not yet. I’m supposed to be super religious about soft foods for at least another couple of days, so hopefully nothing dumb is going to happen between now and then.

One weird thing: we very nearly had to cancel the extraction because of my blood pressure. I also had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and my blood pressure was a reasonable 120/83. The first two readings in the dentist’s chair, despite me not feeling either especially nervous or, really, any emotional or physical symptoms at all, were an absolutely insane 173/120 and 171/123, both of which are alarmingly close to get to the hospital right now levels of hypertension. They did the filling and tested me again and it was down to 136/87, still high, but not what the fuck high. It’s crazy to me that my blood pressure can get that high without me feeling any particular sort of way while it’s going on, but had it hit that a third time they’d have had to reschedule me with an oral surgeon who could put me completely under instead of doing the extraction in-office.

Weird.

I’ve spent the majority of the day since getting home blasting through Dungeon Crawler Carl VI: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride on my Kindle; I’ve probably read over half of it today and I’m getting progressively more and more angry about how fucking good this series is. It’s absolutely unfair that something this ridiculous has this much emotional heft to it. Somebody should be in jail. It doesn’t have to be anyone affiliated with the book, as I doubt Matt Dinniman could finish the series from behind bars, so we may have to pick someone else. The President, maybe.

It was this or a bigger house

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading6 Comments

I have all the books.

Wait.

I worry that what you heard was “I have a lot of books.”

I have all the books. Do you understand?

And, as you no doubt can tell, I have lots of other shit as well. And three other people live in this house! They have stuff too, even though nearly every single object you can see in these pictures is mine. Except the Pokéballs. Those are the boy’s.

This is the second house in a row where we have eventually decided to convert what was supposed to be the dining room into a library. I am absolutely out of places to put shit and I have been reading at a 175-books-a-year clip for the last couple of years. I still have some space on top of bookshelves, especially if I get rid of some of the statues and Legos (and the statues, honestly, may be on their way out soon) but one way or another I’m no more than two years away from needing to pile shit on the floors if something doesn’t change.

So yesterday, fearing an actual intervention, I ordered this:

along with a $12-a-month subscription to Kindle Unlimited. I’m thinking about instituting a rule that any book by a new author gets bought on digital first. Does that mean I won’t get those books in physical form? Not necessarily; as you can tell, I’m not just a reading enthusiast, I’m a book collector, and those two hobbies feed into each other in obvious and terrible ways. There will be books by new authors that I feel the need to own physically. But in most years at least 30% of my books are by authors new to me– this year, right now, it’s actually just over half. Surely this will end up saving me money as well as essential shelf space, right? That Dinniman book on the cover of the Kindle there is in one of those pictures in hardcover– on the white bookshelves, a couple shelves below the Wheel of Time books– but it was free on KU so I downloaded it anyway, to see if I lose my mind trying to read a thousand-page book on an e-reader. We’ll see.

We can’t move. We got our mortgage rate on this house before the economy exploded. We’ll never see this rate again. I’ve got to do something.

In which maybe I *am* good at this

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

We took a field trip today, to a manufacturing plant, and got a tour and little presentations by a dozen or so different people over the course of the trip, and … man. Maybe talking to kids is a lot harder than I think it is? Not teaching, mind you, just talking to kids. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate these folks, and there’s something to be said for trying, and everyone was really nice, but it was really, really clear that these folks have been embedded in manufacturing-speak and boat-speak for forever and that they had no idea how much of the vocabulary they were using would be completely opaque to adults outside the field, much less actual children. Like, maybe when you’re talking to a bunch of kids, don’t use a lot of acronyms? I’m a grown-ass man with two Master’s degrees and I don’t know what the hell a BMA could possibly be, and the context isn’t helping me at all because I don’t know shit about manufacturing or boats. I could follow along with the IT guy’s spiel, on account of being a big nerd, but I’m pretty sure I was the only one in the room, and he’d probably have gotten a lot more engagement out of the kids if he’d talked about the giant gutted server blade that was sitting on the desk in front of him. Instead, he just kept talking about blades, and my kids were looking around for swords.

Here’s everything I know about boats, in fact:

Sigh.

I mean, whatever; the trip ended with my group getting to climb all over a couple of very expensive looking boats, and they enjoyed that, and at least we didn’t go to the box factory? One group got two hours about boxes. Boats are better than boxes.

In other news, and I don’t think this is me being mean or inappropriate but if you disagree let me know and maybe I’ll delete it, but I encountered this man on my way home yesterday and he is the angriest … banjo? Ukulele? Mandolin? Let’s go with mandolin, it looks like it’s got eight strings– player I’ve ever seen. Like, prior to observing him for a minute or two at a red light, I would not have believed that you could play a mandolin at someone, much less at passing cars, but holy hell. I don’t know what he was upset about, but every ounce of it was getting poured into that instrument. I kinda wish I could have heard him.

In which I started with Pong

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

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.

In which today got away from me

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, ParentingLeave a comment

Three or four Saturdays in a row now have involved a lengthy afternoon nap; my body has been doing this thing to me where I’m waking up at 6:30 on Saturday mornings whether I want to or not (spoiler alert: I don’t want to) and have been completely unable to get back to sleep. This has led to hours-long naps on each of those Saturdays, eating my entire afternoon.

Well, tonight the boy had a birthday party to go to that was a good 45 minutes from our house, so after driving him out there my wife and I had dinner at Das Dutchman Essenhaus and spent some time attempting to shop in Amish country; it turns out Amish country shuts down entirely at 6:00 PM on Saturdays other than that one restaurant so we didn’t really get to do any actual shopping, instead driving around and alternately dodging horses that were supposed to be in the road and chickens and deer that weren’t. We just got home; it’s 9:00 and I still feel like we dragged the boy away from his party too early.

(The family of this friend of his is richer than God; the building we originally thought was their house, because it was house-shaped and considerably bigger than our own house, was actually their gym, an entirely separate building from their actual house. When he got in the car at the end of the night he said that they had spent a fair amount of time at the party digging a tunnel in their foam pit, which means they have a foam pit. We do not have foam pit money in the Siler household.)

Anyway, I’ve spent all day writing a review of Keith Ammann’s new book in my head; I got an early copy of it and it releases this week, so absent any world-shaking events that absolutely must be written about, expect a book review tomorrow.