Only Mostly Dead

I've not been dead, I swear.  Only mostly dead.  I have 21 credits this term, so that's roughly 21 contact hours per week plus a supposed 63 hours per week spent out-of-class on reading, papers, assigned busy-work, and projects.  That "projects" category is the worst: it includes seven group projects this term, two of which involve "short" (i.e. 15 and 30 minute) presentations.

And of all the projects, I think only one qualifies as a proper "group project".  I wrote one of my papers (for which I got to choose any topic I'd like) last term on how to properly structure group projects so that they do what's intended, that is, get students working collaboratively and better learning the materials.  (Note that, of course, this presumes that the real purpose of the project is to help students learn, not to reduce the number of papers the instructor needs to grade by roughly 80%.  I suspect most projects actually fall into this latter category for one reason or another.)

Anyway, that one project is a comprehensive financial plan.  That's actually challenging and takes us working together to get done since not a one of us is an actual CFP.  Meanwhile, everything else is "group paper", "group paper", "group paper", zzzzzzzzzzz.  To quote one of my sources for that paper about properly-structured group projects: “writing is inherently an individual activity,” and in a group paper, “the only real group activity will be deciding how to divide up the work."

I also caught a horrid flu in week 6 of this term.  Had a little bit of a ticklish throat set in at 8:00 on a Wednesday night, and woke up at 5 AM Thursday with a fever, vomiting like crazy.  I had two mid-term exams on that Friday, which I somehow managed to take (all hail anti-emetics!) and which I should likely not have gone to, considering how contagious I'm sure I was.  But with the college policy being "no misses without a doctor's excuse" my choice was either: go out on public transit for a while and then sit in a doctor's waiting room for an hour or two to get the excuse and then have to arrange make-up exams and the whole rigmarole, or go out on public transit a while and sit in a testing lab for an hour or two and be done with it all, I took option two.  It took nearly a month for the cough and chest congestion from that thing to finally clear up.  I'm clearly too old for this shit.

Anyway!  Been playing Borderlands 2 and Deus Ex: Human Revolution lately, alternately, depending on whether I'm on the Steam Link (Borderlands 2) or the actual desktop (Deus Ex).  This switch is mostly because I've been wanting to play through Deus Ex but I find it too difficult to play with the controller, and its interface is insanely difficult to read on the huge TV across the room, even if I adjust the resolution downward.

It's funny: I've been PC gaming so long that while I'd assume a controller is a much easier way to game, I'm finding it ridiculously difficult to re-learn.  (I've not had a console for 20 years now.)  The Steam controller has at least 15 different input methods (some buttons, some triggers, some touch-pads, a stick, &c.), and some of those are context-sensitive (e.g., in Borderlands 2, the X button is variously "use" or "reload" depending on what the camera's pointing at) as well as having different inputs themselves (such as the stick, which in this game is directional movement, but is also the button for "mark inventory item trash/favorite" when pressed; or the right trackpad which is camera or, when pressed, "trigger special skill").

All up, though, I love my controller and Steam link.  If I'm totally wiped out by a day of death-by-PowerPoint in-class, and group meetings out-of-class, sitting down to a few sniper shots as Zero really helps brighten my day.