Posts Tagged → Kurt Vonnegut

Blogging about diseases is boring and sad but I need to remember these things so here we are

I haven’t been reading much. Well, I’m still reading a little, but I’m so preoccupied that in my off time I just veg out and either watch YouTube or TikTok. Still, I’ve gotten through Dungeon Crawler Carl and am currently working through the second book in the series, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario. I’m doing the print version and the audiobook (which is interestingly done).

The series is fine. I like the relative mindlessness of it. Blowing up goblins and punching monsters so hard they explode. There are some unique aspects to the plot structure that are worth examining on a serious level — I feel like the arc of the story is built to be understood from a macroscopic lens; characters will make more sense the more books you get into the story. It’s as if the author planned on writing hundreds of thousands of words and just thought, “We’ll get to it eventually.”

As a writer, I’m used to doing this stuff quickly — I’m borderline minimalist. “Get to it!” that’s my motto. Or, as Vonnegut puts it, “Start as close to the end as possible.” Don’t waste words; your readers’ time is valuable and you should use it well. Reading Carl reminds me how flexible these rules are, because there’s a lot of stuff I don’t get or simply wouldn’t do.

It’s unfathomable to me that we don’t have more information about Carl’s ex-girlfriend yet, even though you know she’s going to make an appearance (or be brought back up somehow.)

I’m also not a fan of giving readers actual numbers for strength and intelligence. This book will give each character a level and stats, all of which are explicitly told to readers. Is this why they’re calling it “LitRPG?” (Horrible, horrible name IMO. And maybe, overall, just a bad idea.)

Increases in ability should be shown through action not spreadsheets. The spreadsheets were only ever created for RPGs like D&D where you couldn’t easily show strength or intelligence through action. In a narrative, though, all we have is time to show how characters act. That’s the whole point of a story.

I will never read a sentence like, “My strength was at 30 so I was confident I could win the fight,” and think, “That’s some good writing!”

I know, I know, not everything needs to be literary. Besides my gripes at the LitRPG genre in general, Dungeon Crawler Carl has been fun so far.

Anywho.

My dad has a feeding tube installed in his stomach and is out of the hospital, but his condition doesn’t seem to be…improving, or at least not improving rapidly. While he’s glad to be home, he really doesn’t have a lot of energy. I don’t know if that’s from the cancer or if it’s from weeks of not being able to swallow due to the tumor in his esophagus (which is growing rapidly), but it isn’t a good sign.

Sarah, my brother, and I went down to visit yesterday. Dad was able to get up and move around, but not much. He can’t swallow anything at all and chews on ice like they have you do in the hospital. His headaches are getting bad. He has a big red bottle of hydrocodone you can inject in his feeding tube.

Radiation treatments start this Thursday and will continue for most of April. Chemo will start after that, depending on how the radiation goes.

A “home run” at this point isn’t a cure; a home run is shrinking the tumor in dad’s throat enough that he can swallow food. Not only will that make his quality of life much better, but being able to get more nutrition will be an added bonus. Dad loves eating and I hate thought of him missing out on food he enjoys in favor of the flavorless goop that goes right into his belly.

Time marches forward.

School continues. The ACTs are tomorrow and I get to proctor.

Sarcastic yay.

Does this bell work

There are a lot of things that happen in an educational setting today that didn’t happen when I was in high school. No surprise there — I’m a solidly middle-aged guy, so you’d expect that things would have changed in some way, shape, or form.

One change that has become an everyday buzzword in schools is a thing called “Bell Work.”

Practically, there’s nothing really new or groundbreaking about the idea of Bell Work; it’s just an activity or assignment that students are supposed to work on right as the bell is ringing at the start of class. The goal is to more efficiently utilize class time by having students do something immediately when they enter the room. (Because, presumably, students were doing nothing before.)

I’m guessing Bell Work became a thing because some administrator somewhere wanted to make it look like they were “improving” student and teacher performance at their school or district by shaving off those wasted minutes of class during which those same teachers and students were saying hello to each other and/or making small talk.

Anywho. There are a variety of bell work activities that I have students do throughout the year, but right now we’re doing a new kind of bell work that I’m calling “The Fight Bracket.”

Basically, I created a tournament bracket of 16 fictional characters that are going to square off in battle to discover who, ultimately, is the strongest fictional character of all. At the end of class, I give students a QR code to a Google Form that asks, “Who would win in a fight, X or Y?” and has the day’s two contestants as options. Whoever gets the most votes is crowned victorious and moves on to the next round.

The next day, I share the results and give out the next “Battle.”

ChatGPT made this. Sue me.

What does all of this have to do with English? Not a damned thing! It’s just entertaining to talk about.

No offense to the admin who thought up “Bell Work” as a way to show their boss that they were making schools better by cutting out all that “wasted class time,” but I’m going to spend a little bit of each day just doing fun stuff.

As Kurt Vonnegut said,

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don’t let anybody tell you different.”