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| title | date | tags | draft | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| I want to fuck my computer (week notes 027) | 2025-08-06 |
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true |
Doing
I'm still working on planning for the college class I'm teaching in a few weeks. I need to have my basic syllabus done within the next week or two, but I don't really plan that way, so I'm going week by week and outlining the entire lesson. It's a lot of work, but I'm feeling a lot better than I was last week. I was previously trying to reverse engineer the previous professor's syllabus while bringing in some of my own resources, but I gave myself permission to do my own thing and only consult her work when I felt I needed something more for a lesson or a text. I'm moving much faster and things feel easier now, so it's just a matter of doing the work.
I've been playing with the idea for a while now of buying a new monitor for my desk at work — the school issues me one (and I asked for a second to have a dual monitor setup, which they did give me), but they're pretty bottom of the barrel office displays. They're not even 1080p, which is a real pain for grading on our archaic LMS. I hunted around for deals on a cheap display, but I found that anything worth spending money on far outpaced my displays at home (a Dell S2340M that I bought in 2015 and an ASUS VZ239H-W from 2016 that I inherited from my sister). I ended up cashing in some of my credit card rewards points and taking advantage of a sale1 to get a KTC H27T22C-3, which will be a big upgrade for me (23" to 27"; 1080p to 1440p; much higher refresh rate and a new IPS panel). Then I got on my bullshit and started researching monitor arms — I've always wanted one, but neither of my previous displays were VESA compatible. I found a crazy deal for a white Ergotron MXV dual monitor mount on eBay (a little over $100 shipped), bought a VESA adapter for the Dell and a plate to distribute the weight on my desk, and now I'm just waiting for everything to come in. I really want this school year to stop staying so late at school and just do work at home, where I have a much more comfortable and quality set up2 (including a Steelcase Leap v2, which I recently found on Facebook Marketplace in mint condition for $175). I'm justifying my recent exorbitant spending on my office as a way to stop spending so much fucking time on my phone and instead put that energy into building websites, playing games, and maybe getting back into content creation.3
Reading
Most of my reading from here on out is going to be prep work for my college class and for the coming school year. I'm almost done with Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, which I'm glad to say is as good as I remember it — it was a favorite of mine as a teen. I also recently learned that there's a graphic novel version that I'd like to get my hands on one day. Frankly, I'd love to teach this book one day in the classroom (not for a college course) — even if it is dated in terms of publication year (the themes are perennial) — but that's not really possible with the age group that I teach right now.
I'm also refreshing myself on chapters from Literature for Young Adults: Books (and More) for Contemporary Readers by Joan L. Knickerbocker and James A. Rycik, which is our textbook for the course. I know The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros well enough that I was able to plan all of that from memory, but I pulled two poems from Silent Dancing: A Partial Remembrance of a Puerto Rican Childhood by Judith Ortiz Cofer to pair with it. I first read the better part of Silent Dancing in undergrad — I think for a world lit class — and really loved it; the title story is particularly resonant and haunting. I'd like to go back and read it in full when I'm less bogged down with work.
Watching
Joe and I are still watching old seasons of Survivor — we're on Caramoan right now. There are no returning players for 50 on it, but we enjoyed South Pacific, and I see Caramoan as kind of part two of that season. We're still following Austin Walker's Let's Play of Knights of the Old Republic II and then watching Friends at the Table Ali's Mistria Mondays when we need turn off our brain content.
Playing
I'm back on my Fields of Mistria bullshit now that we're home. At this point, I've exhausted a lot of the content currently available, which isn't a bad place to be — I've seen just about everything (except heart events, which I really don't interact with in these types of games) and now can focus on 100% things and beautifying my farm. There's still a few things that will unlock at higher town ranks, and I can keep looking forward to the regular updates.
Listening
I listened to Tapestry by Carole King. I'm not really sure why — I knew it wasn't really going to be for me. It's a legendary album and I'm sure deserves its place in music history, but as an individual listener in 2025, I found it a bit ho-hum.
I also listened to I Love My Computer by Ninajirachi, which fucking bangs. Recommended for fans of Charli XCX's earlier, more PC music-adjacent era4, and general hyperpop/EDM folks. Listen to "Fuck My Computer," "Delete," and "All I Am" for a taste of what the whole album is like; I'm particularly enamored with "Sing Good," but the whole album feels like an ode to teenage creativity and terminally online behavior, both of which I am deeply nostalgic for.
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I've been slowly cutting down on my Amazon purchasing — I'm hoping to be almost entirely off of it soon — but I don't have any brick and mortar electronics stores around me aside from Walmart, which feels like a lateral move... and a bitch needs a discount every now and then. ↩︎
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Ideally I would be doing no work outside of the school day, but that's not the reality of teaching — and also I am a workaholic and perfectionist. Let me live. ↩︎
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I hate this term but I can't think of anything better to use right now. ↩︎
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I love brat and believe it brought PC Music's innovative sound to the mainstream, but that also works against it: it's somewhat diluted compared to the bizarre, abstract, creative shit that PC Music and similar artists put out over the years. ↩︎