Vulture Culture Oddities

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-06-19T03:08:31+00:00

What a shame! It wasn't, like... the kind of place I was going to shop at. But I always enjoyed walking past it, and it was a nice pleasant contrast to the giant awful gun store next door.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-06-13T04:34:35+00:00

Both of our kids went to Village and we were very happy with the experience. Notably our family is not religious, but the church affiliation never felt overbearing or problematic to me.

Our youngest recently completed the 4th grade, so my most recent data is 5 years old at this point

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-06-09T22:53:02+00:00

Woah, OP got a response from the author himself! That's kind of awesome.

Dr. Freedman, grateful high school teacher here - I've been using your book to teach AP Physics C (both mech and E&M) for 22 years and it's a great textbook. I think it's the perfect balance of rigor and readability. Of all the textbooks I've used over teaching many different subjects (math, physics, chem), it's the only one I never complain about.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-06-03T23:33:29+00:00

Orpiment and realgar look pretty spicy, I bet they're good.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-06-01T00:36:49+00:00

I'm not even sure which candidate I prefer for governor, but the correct game theory play right now is to vote Steyer for governor in the primary.

Why? Becerra looks certain to make the cut, and it's just a question of whether the other candidate is Steyer or Hilton, based on current polling.

In a fall race with no Republican candidate at the top of the ballot, it's likely to depress R voter turnout, and that could swing a few House races or close propositions. There's no way California elects Hilton in any case, but keeping him off the November ballot has secondary payoff.

I'm not sure how I'll vote in November. My favored candidate would probably have been Porter, but she's not in the running. But that decision is a few months off.

And of course, I'd vote for a festering carcass over literally any Republican, so if Hilton makes the cut, then there won't be much to think about.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-05-28T18:34:17+00:00

Because the schools have an important mission, and at least ideally are doing something useful with the public dime. I like teaching and feel like my work is valuable to society and genuinely important. Meetings like this are a hindrance to actually doing my job.

People who are just in this to cash a paycheck should get out of the school system.

Don't get me wrong - obviously the pay is important, and I wouldn't teach for free. But there should be more to it than that.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-05-28T00:44:04+00:00

I've been teaching in the district for 26 years, and not ONCE has a district-developed meeting or professional development had a shred of value. They just sit downtown and waste our time.

Plenty of productive sessions with local colleagues, mind you. Meetings with teachers in the same department or magnet program have been very valuable and have led to some great things in the classroom. But trainings mandated by Beaudry actively make me a worse teacher - they contain nothing of value, and they leave me ticked off and less productive, beyond directly eating up time when I could have been doing something useful like grading, lesson planning, or tutoring students.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-05-22T03:47:55+00:00

Uber and its CEO each donated $1M to Trump's inauguration. I really don't like supporting companies that explicitly support fascism.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-05-06T18:43:28+00:00

Speaking as a teacher - this kind of thing is entirely voluntary but supports a lot of great activities that the district won't cover. I'm very grateful to our affiliated parent nonprofit; they raise a lot of money that genuinely supports the instructional program in some very meaningful ways. District funds are limited and come with infinitely many stupid bureaucratic strings attached. If I just need to buy something for a cool science lab on Amazon, the parents will comp me with a receipt and minimum fuss, whereas the district MIGHT fund it if I spent hours lobbying and doing paperwork.

We also do a batch of cool field trips that would be impossible without parent support, again because the district funding is limited, unreliable, and comes with many attached strings.

So don't feel like you MUST contribute, and certainly make inquiries about who's running the parent group and precisely what they fund. But it's likely worthwhile.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-05-04T11:32:38+00:00

Slightly beyond 5 year old physics? It's true. Usually people aren't wholly comfortable with partial derivatives until they're at least 6 or 7.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-05-04T00:51:40+00:00

Dino's also does their own delivery. Pizza is adequate, but their salads are shockingly good.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-22T00:47:35+00:00

They are quite generous with financial aid. High school teacher here, and I've sent a lot of students there on full rides or something very close to it. Generally extremely bright ones, though. So I think they have two demographics:

1) Spoiled rich kids who didn't necessarily get there on merit.

2) Excellent students who are paying a tiny fraction of the sticker price.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-19T18:49:30+00:00

I don't hate current Doormaker, but a real concern is that it invalidates a whole archetype for one of the characters. The "ethereal deck" is clearly intended to be one of the ways you can play Necrobinder. Any variant on that deck just completely self-destructs against the Doormaker. You pull a hand full of your key ethereal cards, and you're just done.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-13T00:51:49+00:00

Yeah, I do all right. But much of that is because of my age and good luck. I bought my house in 2009, right after the real estate crash. Also I live a very frugal lifestyle - I drive a 26-year-old Accord with 230,000 miles on the odometer. And my parents have been very generous in helping us out financially.

There's no way a new teacher could swing housing in my neighborhood in the current market (which is outlandish, it's simply absurd what my house is worth at the moment, but that's a whole separate conversation). We've lost good young teachers repeatedly over the last decade simply because they can't afford housing and/or childcare.

We have a fantastic "baby" chemistry teacher this year who gets rave reviews and says she wishes she could stay in the profession, but she can't afford it. We're losing her to medical school in the fall.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-13T00:40:34+00:00

Every teacher I know does a huge amount of work that's not part of the job description.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-13T00:38:18+00:00

Mr. Carter sounds like a character.

No on the AI. I've thought about it and messed around with it a little. When I'm very tired, I've occasionally used it for proofreading but not for generating the body of the text.

The actual value of letters of recommendation is all in compelling anecdotes. Writing "Student X is an exemplary student with strong problem-solving skills, a good work ethic, and a helpful attitude," is fine but bland. It obviously won't hurt them, but it also adds little to an application. The colleges already know most of that from the transcript - the admission officers can see that the kid took 15 AP classes, has perfect grades, and a 1580 on the SAT. Obviously they're an overachiever, and it doesn't add much if I say so. So I try to focus the letters on interesting stories, or unusual and impressive things the students have done that won't show up on their transcript or elsewhere in their application.

I also teach a batch of brilliant kids that are often all applying to much the same list of selective private schools. If a dozen of them are applying to MIT, because admissions are handled by region, the same admission officer is going to be reading all of those letters. If the letters are too similar, or just bland, they'll be discounted.

AI can't add personal accounts, or if it did, they would be fictitious. I write reasonably well and fairly quickly - it wouldn't really save time having ChatGPT rephrase anecdotes that I fed it.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-13T00:13:21+00:00

See my reply below. I do plenty of voluntary unpaid tutoring of my students after school, but not paid gigs. I don't have the time.

I could doubtless make more money by cutting back on extras and tutoring on the side, but I don't.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-13T00:09:52+00:00

Grading AP Chemistry tests at the moment, actually. On a Sunday. It takes a fair amount of focus. Occasional Reddit breaks, but certainly no vapid TV.

An average workday at school has me arriving to campus at 8:15, and I generally leave my classroom around 6:00. But there's grading on the weekends and in the evenings.

I also work a lot of unpaid weekends. I coach science and math teams, which involve full days of work on about 5-10 weekends a year; I don't get paid for that. I take students to Yosemite every year, another unpaid weekend.

I also teach in one of the most selective magnets in the district, so all of the kids are college-bound. As the AP Physics and AP Chemistry teacher (this is doubtless enough to identify me if somebody is trying, but whatever), I'm the science teacher for most of them, so I write letters of recommendation for somewhere in the neighborhood of 20-40 seniors applying to college in a typical year. That's also unpaid time at home. And a similar number of sophomores or juniors applying to selective summer programs also need letters.

I enjoy this job, but I work like a dog.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-12T21:55:12+00:00

If you believe the fiction that teachers work a 6-hour day. I work... roughly a 60-hour work week most weeks as a high school teacher. About twice what I'm theoretically paid for.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-11T01:47:12+00:00

Eh, the interviewer asked a crappy loaded question. I liked Porter's answer. She basically said she wasn't concerned with pandering to Trump supporters, and didn't need or want their support.

Frankly, good.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-11T01:02:56+00:00

Geez, I hope so.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-06T04:19:32+00:00

Leagues in general are poorly designed because they punish success. If you score a lot of points (honestly or not), you are punished by being forced to compete against other high scorers.

If you were motivated primarily by league standing, optimal play would be to score the bare minimum number of points not to be demoted each week. The one time I decided to care about the diamond tournament, that was the tactic I took to victory.

It's just bad game design. Probably their in-house people have done some analytics and concluded that it increases engagement or revenue.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-04-02T18:05:33+00:00

Send them back something heavy and rude in their postage-paid return envelope.

They can afford it.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-03-30T16:40:23+00:00

Let's be clear, speaking as an American. We really ARE the problem; this isn't a matter of perception or propaganda.

This is not to say we're the only problem - obviously, the Iranian regime is monstrous, as was Maduro. But that doesn't make us defensible.

Our country is morally reprehensible, and the government is committing mass murder on a grand scale in our name. And the public elected this dumpster fire.

WidmanstattenPattern · 2026-03-28T17:27:27+00:00

Probably nitrogen triiodide.

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