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Cake day: February 12th, 2024

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  • The Air Force once injected an unsolved, 1000-year-old mathematical puzzle written in another language into the game Prometheus, and an unemployed college dropout genius who lived with his mom solved it, got recruited to participate in a highly classified mission to the planet P4X-351 where he, a crew of Air Force officers and personnel, and a few civilian scientists ended up being forced to evacuate due to an impending planet-wide explosion (as well as an aerial assault by a band of space pirates) by jumping through a stable wormhole whose terminus was aboard the starship Destiny - an abandoned scientific vessel launched one million years prior by a species known as The Ancients who had planned to use it to travel to the center of the known universe.




  • I just had teacher trainings this week at the school district I am working for this year after moving from Texas to the PDX area. It was like night and day compared to Texas. The training began with Land Acknowledgements, and we spent a few hours learning about and discussing how we will be implementing cross-curricular activities on the culture, language, and practices of the Native American tribes from this area. I teared up, I gotta tell ya.

    But the thing that really hit me the hardest was how comfortable I felt as a queer person. They asked us to put our pronouns on our name tent, and I initially put the ones I was assigned at birth (because I’m coming from Texas where I didn’t dare let on that I wasn’t cisgender). But I soon realized through discussions with the trainers and with people at mine and surrounding tables that this really is a safe place, that I can be myself and not fear repercussions that would affect my livelihood.

    So I shared during discussions about privilege and power that I was non-binary, and nobody batted an eye, no microgestures indicating their discomfort, it was just…normal. Safe. I’ve never felt like this before. Every queer person…teacher, student, citizen, immigrant, or otherwise…should be allowed to feel like this.





  • I hate Apple so god damned much. When I got started in 2003 with the cohort I was in for my elementary education degree, the university required us to get an Apple MacBook G4. We weren’t allowed to choose any other laptop, just that one, and we had to get it from the campus computer store (so of course the school was getting a kickback 🖕).

    The power cord on those had a weird round dongle on the end that plugged into the computer. In the center of the dongle was a very thin pin. So, of course, I accidentally tripped on it, and the pin snapped off inside the computer. Easy enough to remove, but it meant I had to buy a brand new adapter to do my coursework.

    $80.

    Eighty fucking dollars. And there were no third-party adapters at the time (at least when I looked). Oh, and that replacement adapter? CAUGHT ON FUCKING FIRE.

    I have not spend a dime on anything Apple touches since then. I’ve been issued iPads by school districts for which I’ve worked in the past, but those pretty much stay locked up in my cabinet. Nope…no Apple Music, no Apple TV, not even a covered-by-the-district $1.99 app for my school iPad.

    Luckily, as teacher, I’ve either been issued a Dell or at the very least a MacBook Air with Windows 10 bootcamped every year since. Unfortunately, I am in a new district in Oregon this year (had been in Texas), and my device this year is a non-bootcampable MacBook Air. 🤬






  • In the book Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, the main character Sadie is a video game designer who created his game in which you play a worker creating factory parts. If you ignore what’s going on around you and just focus on winning the game by making the parts better and faster, eventually the game ends and it becomes clear that you were creating equipment for Nazis during the Holocaust and, thus, you lose the game.

    Movies love to have twist endings in which something would have been obvious if you were paying better attention. I think more video games need to do this as well.