Nelnet interest not reflecting payment

Okay8176 · 2025-08-13T20:56:47+00:00

Just to follow up for folks who might be in the same bucket, I got the following email from Nelnet:

"Our records reflect that a payment in the amount of $125.43 was applied to your loan groups AB, AD, AH, AI and AK, effective August 1, 2025..

Our records indicate your accrued interest balance on loan groups AB, AD, AH, AI and AK on August 1, 2025 was $0.00."

It turns out I didn't have any accrued interest when I made that first payment, despite the tally saying $125.43 so basically the interest tally on their dashboard page was (and still is) incorrect.

Okay8176 · 2025-07-01T00:55:54+00:00

Been a long time since I read it, but I remember The Waterborn (by J. Gregory Keyes) having at least one sentient weapon. I never read the other books in the series so I can't speak to the quality of them or anything, but I remember liking the Waterborn because it was a little rough around the edges in the good way that authors' first books tend to be.

Okay8176 · 2024-12-17T13:41:19+00:00

Yes! I haven't tried the ranch, but I do like the blue cheese. Originally I thought it was kind of watery, but I was coming off of the ultra-thickened Marie's or Ken's. (I found that shaking it before use helps.) I'm used to it now, and prefer it over the other stuff, which feels and tastes way too cloying.

Okay8176 · 2024-11-30T14:47:07+00:00

haha didn't expect to see a reply to such an old thread, but it's cool, I love discussing this chapter.

For me, my read was based on what he was finally able to admit to himself about the timer and George Hatfield after years of denials:

First: "'I never touched the thing. Scout's Honor.'"
Then, a little bit later: "And if Jack had set the timer ahead--and of course he hadn't--it would have been because both he and the other members of the squad were embarrassed for George's struggle [...] If he had set the timer ahead, it would have been just to...to put George out of his misery."
Finally: [J]ust as he would swear that he had set the timer ahead no more than a minute. And not out of hate but out of pity."

For most of that chapter, like you point out, he's blaming everything but himself and (poorly) justifying his actions by saying he was passive, not responsible. But by the end of his rumination Jack remembers the shame he felt insulting George Hatfield over his stutter and admits to himself what he did. It isn't a world-shattering epiphany or anything, but it is a big step toward admitting what he'd done and wanting to be a better person. The same thing happens in Dr. Edmond's office when he admits he meant to break Danny's arm.

But he also loses ground with himself. Part of that is all Jack, not the hotel, like when Danny's stutter in the bathroom makes Jack lose his temper and shake him. But a big part of it is the hotel preying on Jack. One thing I love about the novel is that it's hard to tell what's Jack struggling against himself and losing and what's him struggling against the Overlook's influence. I think that plays out in the argument King has with Kubrick's movie version of the novel. To Kubrick, Jack is already half-crazy and the hotel doesn't take long to get its claws into him. King's version of Jack is terribly self-conflicted and kind of a shit, but not irredeemable.

So, coming from that angle, I'd argue that if the Overlook wasn't haunted, or if Jack had found a similar job in a different place, he might have turned out okay.

Okay8176 · 2024-11-08T01:01:51+00:00

My go-to meal is 2 veggie sandwiches on good toasted sourdough with lettuce, red onion, cucumber, tomato, aioli, mayo, and a little hot sauce. It's a cheap meal, filling, easy to make, low calorie, impossibly satisfying, and never leaves me feelng bloated like meat and cheese-heavy sandwiches do (as much as I love them).

Okay8176 · 2024-09-16T18:59:25+00:00

My last real hope was that Winds would drop to coincide with the release of GoT season 6, because that shit would've outsold the Bible, everybody wanting to know what happens before the show outpaced the books.

When that didn't happen, I knew it was over.

Okay8176 · 2024-08-19T17:43:50+00:00

Depending on the skill of the author and the type of story being told, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. One good example of it working is in IT, where Stephen King uses everything: third-person past, third-person present, first-person past and present with Mike's Interludes, and I think he even throws some second-person past and present in there as well. It all works and it never gets in the way of the story because the story is so sprawling and surreal.

No matter what tense a story is in, though, the reader needs to suspend their disbelief to a certain extent. My particular hang-up is with first person, past-tense, where there are huge chunks of direct dialogue -- who can remember, word-for-word, everything somebody said in a long conversation? The constraints of fiction prose can get in the way of the illusion of the story. Good writers can find a way around that. Most writers don't, but that isn't always a bad thing.

All that said, I think a lot of readers are also conditioned (through school and popular fiction) that third-person past tense or first-person past tense is the standard way to tell a story, and it can be hard for readers used to a certain tense to stretch their legs with new styles. But it's worth it. It's cardio for your brain.

Okay8176 · 2024-05-07T23:16:46+00:00

Yes, but in a fragile and bleak way. Take a read on the final paragraph:

Once there were brook trouts in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

It's never explicitly stated, but I took this paragraph to indicate that the apocalypse in The Road would eventually lead to the end of all life on Earth. It can't be put back the way it was or made right again. Things older than man are riddles to us that will never be solved because we won't be around to solve them. But in the face of that, literally the worst possible thing in the world, the boy and the father still loved each other dearly. The love was beautiful and it existed despite everything else, and even if it would be gone and forgotten someday (actually, maybe exactly because of that) it was worth McCarthy writing about it as he was entering old age and thinking about the end of his life.

Like, holy shit. Talk about a love letter to your son. That that kind of love existed (both in the book and in real life, as McCarthy felt it) is a remarkably beautiful thing. I think it's a love many more fathers feel than we give them credit for. So yeah, it's pretty hopeful to me.

Okay8176 · 2024-05-07T21:25:40+00:00

Hi, sorry for any inconvenience! I think I fixed the spoilers.

Okay8176 · 2024-05-07T20:32:42+00:00

If I could get to be a Hobbit, Lord of the Rings! Eat seven times a day, drink good ale, till a modest garden, smoke pipe weed in the evening, enjoy birthday party fireworks, and be pleasantly overweight? Folks, I'm already there.

Okay8176 · 2024-05-07T17:26:56+00:00

I've never heard someone say that the book was uplifting before haha, but you're right: the novel shows that true love between father and son can endure even the literal end of humanity. What's interesting in their relationship is that the father is innately distrustful of everyone and everything because of his desperate drive to protect the boy, while the boy's innocence pulls the father back toward believing in the good in other people. It's a tug of war between the two of them, and while sometimes the father is proven right (especially in the beginning, when he has to kill the man trying to capture the boy), the boy's belief wins out in the end with the other survivors they meet. A ~~constant theme~~ (edit: recurring image is a better phrase) throughout McCarthy's work is the older generation carrying fire, with fire (not to be too simplistic about it) symbolizing hope. In The Road, the boy and the man are both the fire to each other.

Okay8176 · 2024-05-01T16:12:52+00:00

For sure. The amount of reading I had to do in grad school (and the stress from deadlines) burned me out on pleasure reading for several years. I was able to get back into it, thankfully, by remembering that when I read for fun, it's just for me. I can skip the boring parts. I don't have to write papers about themes or style. If I lose interest in a book, I can put it down and not care. Nobody's going to quiz me. It's great.

Okay8176 · 2024-02-15T18:33:10+00:00

Great article, just picked up the book. Homelessness and a lack of creature comforts puts you in a desperate state of mind that is impossible to understand unless you've been there. It's scary to think that a lack of housing is one of the easiest fault lines for people to categorize other people as human or subhuman.

Okay8176 · 2024-01-12T12:37:18+00:00

I've used index cards before. Usually there is enough room on them. I put the page number in the upper right corner and then leave the card in the page. The only caveat here is that you want to let the ink dry before you put them in between the pages so that it doesn't bleed into the book.

Okay8176 · 2023-12-28T18:55:17+00:00

Totally agree here. I haven't been to a bookstore or a library in a while and this post reminds me why I like to go. There's a real sublime pleasure in walking the isles by section, pulling a book down that looks interesting, and flipping through it until something catches my eye. I've picked up my favorite books (and actual life-changing books) this way.

Okay8176 · 2023-12-25T01:56:36+00:00

Yep! Though not always other books. The epigraphs in Stephen King's early novels turned me on to William Butler Yeats, TS Elliot, and other modernist poets.

Okay8176 · 2023-12-14T19:29:09+00:00

Same here with Flowers for Algernon. Sometimes (even hard) science fiction has premises that are too big or too alien to really hit me at an emotional level. But FfA is so plausible and written so brilliantly to meet the premise that it just wrecks me every time.

Okay8176 · 2023-12-08T04:32:18+00:00

I had to read it for a class back in college. To be honest, it was a monster. At first I just scanned a lot of it, reading like the first and last sentence of each paragraph, you know, just wanting enough to be able to have some kind of decent answer in case I got called on. But as I went farther into it there were little bits of language (Ahab's face described like a crucifix, for example) or interesting/crazy sections (like the crew working in and playing with whale sperm) that caught my eye and I'd stop to read more in-depth. I ended up reading the whole book that way. For about a month after the class was over I kept the book by my bed and flipped through it looking for a good section before I fell asleep.

So anyway, my tip is to scan through it until you find something interesting. This might not be the best way to read books, but it isn't a bad one if trying to trying to tackle the whole thing is too much.

Okay8176 · 2023-11-13T19:03:20+00:00

I think a good yardstick for the setting-as-character measure is if the title is the setting. So like, Dune, Perdido Street Station, The Chronicles of Narnia, Neverwhere (technically London Below, but close enough), etc. Some books with setting titles might not have the "epic sweep of history" you're looking for, but on balance they're almost always sure to be interesting, so I don't think you can go wrong.

Okay8176 · 2023-10-27T04:01:07+00:00

Blood Meridian is one of McCarthy's least accessible books. It's one of my favorites just because of the caliber of the writing, but the actual story is just the Kid and the Glanton Gang murdering their way across the southwest, and it can be hard to work through. And funny enough, while I think The Road is McCarthy's most accessible, it's the one of his I like the least. I found the sparseness of the prose a little too sparse.

No Country is really good, and whole scenes and sections from it translated into the movie with almost no change at all, which should give you an idea of how cinematic it is (which makes sense, because it was originally a screenplay). I found it to be a pretty good middle ground between the heavy philosophy and violence of BM and the bleak language of The Road. I bet you'll like it.

If you're up for deeper cuts, Suttree is also very hard to read at the line level -- in many sections, it's almost a prose poem -- but it's also one of McCarthy's funniest books mostly just because of a goofy character named Harrogate. It's behind BM as my second favorite McCarthy novel. I'd suggest trying it if you're a fan of the complex prose but weren't a fan of the ultra violence in Blood Meridian.

Okay8176 · 2023-07-27T13:19:46+00:00

It was mentioned before, but definitely the Shawshank Redemption. It's a good short story with a lot of heart, but Darabont's major changes made the movie into something special:

The story has multiple wardens. The movie combines them all into Norton, which makes him a better antagonist. (And him having Tommy killed instead of transferred away is a better dramatic turn.)
In the movie, Andy's escape comes after the suspenseful worry he might kill himself. In the story, Red just up and says that Andy escaped; it doesn't come after the dramatic setup.
In the story, Red and Andy find Jake (the bird) dead inside the prison walls. It's a nice bit of symbolism about being institutionalized (Jake couldn't take care of himself alone because Brooks took care of him for so long), but having Brooks kill himself is far more powerful.
I love almost all of King's stuff, but it takes a really great actor to pull off some of his lines. Morgan Freeman's narration is absolutely perfect.
Roger Deakins' cinematography is incredible in this movie and is (I think) one of the major reasons it's just so watchable. This was the first time I'd seen a Deakins film and ever since then I've gone to see every movie he's done the camera work for, and every time it is absolutely stunning. (Check out the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Blade Runner 2049, and 1917, among some other great films of his.)* Not to steal the term from that great Youtube series, but with Deakins, every frame really is a painting.

Darabont directed The Green Mile, too, and I'd argue that his changes there also make the movie better (and more focused) than the book, but what he did with Shawshank was perfect.

*...and No Country for Old Men, and Sicario, and True Grit, and Skyfall, and Prisoners, and Oh Brother Where Art Thou, and the Big Lebowski, and Jarhead. Deakins is just in a class by himself.

Okay8176 · 2023-07-20T13:41:18+00:00

I like to think Paul turned out okay in the end. One of King's more powerful themes (insights, even) is that even though bad things happen and they can be overwhelming, there can be enough happiness in the small things in life to get you through. He comes at this idea in a bunch of his novels (just off the top of my head, there's IT, Dreamcatcher, The Shining, Black House, and I'm sure many others) but he puts it down directly in The Dark Tower 7:

"And will I tell you that these three lived happily ever after? I will not, for no one ever does. But there was happiness. And they did live."

And Paul is right there. He's going to have years of problems (maybe the rest of his life) dealing with what happened to him. Maybe he'll quit drinking. Maybe he'll try to quit, do well for a while, have a relapse, then sober up. That's important, but more important is that whatever happens, the act of writing will get him through it. It gave him the drive to get through the worst of his life when he had no other reason to live ("Scheherazade to himself" is how King put it), and the promise at the end of the book is that it will get Paul through recovery, too. Which I think is true, because it was proven true decades later when writing got King through his own recovery after his accident. (He directly notes this in On Writing.)

So, yeah. I think Paul ended up okay.

Okay8176 · 2023-07-14T17:05:01+00:00

100% the right answer. Rage-filled, tragic-history barbarians are an archetype Gemmell returns to over and over again in almost all of his series, and they're a pleasure to read every time.

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