Pretty colors and bullshit

On August 29, 2022August 29, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, video games

I am almost certain I have written this post before, but fuck it; when you’ve been blogging as long as I have you get issued an actual certificate that allows you to repeat yourself as much as you want to. So I will say it again: Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and all of its ilk, are not games. They are pretty color simulators. If this was a game, I would be able to play it, and the fact is that I am still completely unable to achieve even basic competency in this nonsense despite multiple attempts over multiple iterations of the game and I’m pretty sure more than one console. I remain resolutely unable to even vaguely comprehend what the fuck is going on whenever my son decides we need a “family Smash night.”

Which he did tonight.

I don’t know how to describe my level of confusion here, guys. I eat difficult games for lunch. Hearing that a game is amazingly difficult, especially games with one difficulty level, where you git gud or you just quit, is like catnip to me. SSBU isn’t difficult so much as incomprehensible, where even the minor skill of keeping track where the fuck my character is on the screen is borderline impossible half the time. The control inputs make no fucking sense at all and no attempt to learn them has ever stuck. About half the time I’m shooting in the wrong direction if I’ve figured out how to shoot at all, and I think midway through most matches the game scrambles what buttons do what just to fuck with you. I am at the point where I’m entertaining the idea that the entire franchise, which, to be clear, involves actual “professional” competitions, is an elaborate hoax directed at me personally. I’m not sure I was even playing. You could tell me that the game was just playing a video and my controller wasn’t even connected and honestly I would probably take it as a relief.

I have watched so-called high level players playing this game, in front of large crowds. Every so often the crowd reacts as if something amazing has happened. Never not once while watching these videos did I have even the slightest idea what the hell had just happened that was more worthy of applause than any other pixelsplosion at any other moment in the game.

(Autocorrect just rejected “pixelsplosion,” which, okay, that’s fair, but it replaced it with “pixels-lotion,” which is even less of a word than “pixelsplosion” is.)

Also, despite having been a Gaming Person for most of my life, I don’t have the slightest idea who about 2/3 of the characters in the game are, and I don’t even know what giant swath of culture they live in that I’m missing out on.

Anyway, I’m so far behind at school that it’s made me functionally immortal, so I’m going to go try and get some work done. The final episode of Horizon: Forbidden West finally, finally, finally airs on the YouTube channel tonight, so we’re gonna take a couple of days off and be back with something else on Friday.

46.0027

On July 6, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

I had a few microwave burritos for lunch, a meal that once I was done with it required me to not only change my shirt, but to wash my face and arms.

Go away, 46, nobody invited you.

(Also, I just opened up the section of this page where I choose categories and enter tags, and I swear to you I was about to put in “Saturday” as a tag. It is Wednesday.)

Well crap

On October 21, 2019 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy4 Comments

I was totally gonna write, like, the best post any of you have ever seen, except my son came in and talked to me for a couple of minutes and now every word of it is gone.

Sigh. I don’t know what the hell happened to my short-term memory but I blame getting old and the Internet and I don’t like it at all.

On minor milestones

On August 21, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

My son started preschool today. I understand at some point he shit himself; for as much as they’re charging I don’t feel bad about them having to change a diaper or two. Or, like, underwear, I guess; he doesn’t wear diapers anymore, but saying that sounds better

That same son turns four on Sunday. I bought him an awesome Transformer toy that turned out to be much more shoddily made than I would have expected, but he appears to love the hell out of it.

I also bought myself a toy tonight, only when I buy my son a “toy” it’s a cool Transformer, and I want to play with it as much as he does, and when I buy myself a “toy” nowadays it’s a god damn blood pressure cuff and I use it to make sure I’m not dying.

Yay. Adulthood.

(My novels are still on sale! Buying one will cheer me up.)

When the hell did I get this old?

On August 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized6 Comments

Okay, I don’t take ibuprofen before bed every night, but c’mon. I’m 38 not 83.

Speaking of lazy…

On May 1, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Stories11 Comments

A friend of mine turned forty on Tuesday. This is (I think) the first time this has happened, which is kinda weird. I have friends who are forty or older, but this is the first example I can think of of a friend turning forty who was not yet forty when we started associating with each other.*

It makes me feel terribly old by proxy. I’m not 40 yet, but I can sure as hell see it from here, and not in a Sarah-Palin-and-Russia sort of way, but an “across the goddamn street on a bright and sunny day” sort of way.

(Related, short anecdote: I got into an argument with my brother a couple of weeks about how old he was. I was wrong– not because I didn’t remember how old he was, but because I didn’t remember how old I was and I therefore did the math to arrive at his age incorrectly. This is a true fucking story, I swear to God. I was off by a solid year, and I think I’d managed to spend a couple of months thinking I was 38 rather than it being a one-time brainfart.)

Anyway. Speaking of me being ancient, let’s talk about my latest life decision. I’m sitting in it right now. There’s a picture of it right there. I have decided that the best move to make with my current life is to become an Old Man with a Recliner. It is not literally “my” chair in the sense that I lay sole claim to it, but I’m starting to believe that it’s mine anyway. My wife called it “Daddy’s Chair” to my son almost the very second he noticed it. I’ve never owned a recliner before, but our couch is developing issues and we needed at least one new place for people to sit in the living room anyway, so I figured I may as well go Full Lazy. Very soon I will start demanding that dinner be on the table when I get home and possibly learning how to snore. Because that is what Old Men with Recliners do, right? Sure.

I turned my phone on during my prep period (I got a prep today!) to discover that there was a two minute old voicemail from the delivery guys that they were sitting in my driveway wondering where the hell I was. “Where I was” was at work, since the damn chair was supposed to be delivered on Saturday. How do I know this? Because I have a full time damn job, and my wife has a full time job, and why the hell would I schedule a delivery on Thursday during ISTEP week when I know damn well neither of us are going to be home? I didn’t, that’s how, and I didn’t get the phone call yesterday to tell me when the delivery was supposed to be like they said I would either, because if I had than I would have rescheduled with those people.

I called the guy right back and was in the early stages of “this is not what was supposed to happen and frankly I’m pretty pissed about it even though I know it’s not specifically your fault” when I realized that I was having the conversation in an empty classroom because I didn’t have any students. At which point I abruptly reversed direction and asked the guys if they minded waiting ten more minutes and raced home. I sat in my chair for about a minute and a half before heading back to work and nearly fell asleep during that minute and a half. That comfortable.

Further updates on my inevitable transformation to Recliner Guy will surely be posted as they happen, unless becoming Recliner Guy makes me too lazy to write any more.

(*) I’ll give it ten minutes until someone pops up on Facebook to point out how terribly wrong I am.

In which I try new things

On December 31, 2013December 31, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized6 Comments

Dag.

I downloaded a new WordPress app yesterday for the iPad, because the stock app is clunky and annoying. I appear to have gone the other way with this one; this new app, BlogPad Pro, appears to be able to keep track of every single damn thing under the sun but as of right now is impressively complicated. Plus I don’t think I’m getting WYSIWYG when I add images– unless the text on this post is going to be insanely tiny or the picture is way bigger than I think it’s going to be, it’s scaling the pictures much bigger than I think it’s going to be on the actual website.

I am also considering a new Twitter app. I know, I’m a rebel.

Right, the picture: On account of the aforementioned sick baby I’ve got in the house, all renovation work has been put on hold, which didn’t keep me from getting a couple of things done during nap time yesterday. I went through my clothes and got rid of a bunch of stuff that I haven’t worn all year. Neat trick: flip your hangers backwards at the beginning of the year; as you wear and wash clothes, turn the hangers the right way. At the end of the year, toss anything that is still on a backwards hanger, because you haven’t worn it in a year. Got rid of about a quarter of my shirts, believe it or not; there are two bags of clothes and such in my car to take to Goodwill and I’m probably going to be trying to get some old electronics out of the house one way or another sometime soon too.

I’m hoping to finish going through my comic books today, finally; we’ll see if that gets done because there are thousands of them and it’s a big job. Apparently “declutter” is also a plan for the new year.

We have no plans for New Year’s tonight, which should not be surprising to anyone; my wife and I are both old people now and we have a two year old and plus it’s bloody Tuesday night, which is not exactly optimal party time for anybody. Tuesday might literally be the worst day for a major holiday. Maybe I’ll get really crazy and have a glass of wine at 10:15 before bed. We’ll see.

Go do something crazy tonight and blame it on me, ‘k?

Edited with BlogPad Pro

In which it sucks how much this sucks

On October 31, 2013October 31, 2013 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy

First things first: sent the summer teacher grant application off today, meaning that I’ve applied for nearly fifty thousand dollars’ worth of grants in 2013, which seems kind of ridiculous. Now we get to move into my favorite thing: waiting to find out if people will be giving me money. Cross your fingers for me, ‘k?

I’m in my office right now, hiding from Trick-or-Treaters because they’re too much of a pain in my ass to deal with.

I hate Halloween. There, I said it.

This hasn’t always been true– in fact, for most of my life Halloween has been one of my favorite holidays if not my actual favorite holiday. It was great when I was a kid, and there have been scattered moments of greatness in my adult Halloweens as well– dressing as Darth Maul right around when Episode One came out was certainly a highlight. But I am officially too old and too crotchety to enjoy this shit anymore– working in a middle school, for one thing, has ruined Halloween for me, because it turns my kids into such huge pains in the ass– and on top of that the cultural shift where “slutty _____” has become the default costume for every girl over ten years old everywhere has turned me into a goddamn puritan.

Not everything has to be about fucking. Halloween isn’t supposed to be about fucking. There should not be any such thing as a “sexy cat costume.” Cats aren’t sexy! No one thinks cats are sexy, and if we find someone who breaks the rules and does we lock them the fuck up and feel good about ourselves for it!

(Which… huh. I don’t appear to know how to link to Google Images sites anymore; Safari just puts the damn search term in the address bar. Ah, there we go, it works in Chrome: None of these women look like goddamn cats. This is what Mardi Gras is supposed to be for, goddammit, not Halloween. You wanna have a holiday called Dress Like A Stripper Day? I’m in, and I’m willing to insist that guys dress like Chippendales for it too. That’s not a cat. It’s a stripper with stupid ears.)

Also, and this is more of a personal thing, we have two huge dogs and neither of them are terribly great about strangers, meaning that we have to do whatever we can to keep the doorbell from being rung all night. We currently have our candy in a bowl on a picnic table in the driveway to keep the kids away from the dogs. Many of the children, unsurprisingly, are not bright enough to notice it– some of them will literally walk around it on their way to the front door, which I’ve done my damnedest to make look uninviting And it’s raining, which means that even if they were wearing cool costumes, and most of them aren’t, they’re covered up in raincoats and umbrellas and hoodies and shit. Sacrifice for your art, goddammit. Get some bloody waterproof makeup and show off the damn costume. Assuming you’re actually dressed as something, that is.

(Huge ruckus outside; I prepare to actually literally go tell some teenage kids to get off my damn lawn.)

(Ruckus ends abruptly as it started; I think the neighbor’s Rottweiler tried to eat someone. Good.)

Note the following: I will drop at least some of my objections to Halloween as soon as local jurisdictions acquire some goddamn sense, drop this October 31 nonsense (not one person in a hundred can explain why Halloween is October 31) and bloody move the holiday to the last Friday in October. Halloween during the week is idiotic for a wide variety of reasons, not least among which is going to be the spike in suspensions at schools across the country tomorrow.

Bah. Humbug.