Well, that was lovely

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

The bride is the eldest daughter of my wife’s favorite cousin, and she and her sister are easily my favorites among my wife’s side of the family (who, for the record, are all perfectly fine people; I’ve gotten very lucky with my in-laws) but I was unfortunately unsuccessful in my attempts to encourage either chicanery or shenanigans. She’s marrying into a family that is substantially more religious than anyone on our side, and I am the least religious of our side by a significant margin, so I was at least hoping for some entertainment or at least horror stories out of that, but it didn’t happen– the church was lovely, the reception was gorgeous, the pastor seemed to be a perfectly fine fellow, and I really didn’t feel like the experience as a whole was any more Jesusy than any other wedding I’ve been to, so all good there as well. The wedding was even short! Twenty minutes, in and out.

That said, they put out a Bible next to the guest book, and asked everyone to pick their favorite verse and sign next to it, and … well … never ask an atheist with graduate degrees in Hebrew Bible to pick his favorite Bible verse.

(She will think this is hilarious. I mentioned to her at one point that I had briefly considered flipping her and her mother off as they officially walked into the church– we sat in the back and were the first people she saw when they walked in, and she and I locked eyes for a moment– and she laughed and told me I should have done it.)

They also did a neat thing where they put a card on each of the tables at the reception and asked the guests to give them advice, with each card to be read on the anniversary corresponding to the table number. Ours was table 7, so they will read our card on their 7th anniversary. I did not write that I hope they enjoyed my funeral, which was my first thought, since there is no way 2035 is even a real year.

At any rate, we are back in our hotel room right now, a room which somehow is sporting four queen-sized beds for the three of us, and in accordance with prophecy and our most ancient and revered familial traditions, none of us have spoken a word since we got back. I’m going to read for a while and go to bed, since there’s a family breakfast in the morning and I will need to restore needed energy for further socialization.

Fair warning

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Coming home and dying on Fridays seems to have been a thing lately, and indeed, that’s what I did tonight, and we are going to be at a wedding out of town tomorrow night, so don’t expect much more than a hotel picture unless I can con the bride into something vaguely compromising. Luckily, I don’t have a lot of planning to do for Monday, because I suspect once we get back on Sunday all three of us are going to collapse into separate rooms and not speak again for a while.

I quit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

All of it. Forever. Forever and ever, and ever and ever.

This is a review of a local high school, and I hope the author steps on a Lego every time she gets out of bed for the rest of her stupid life, and I hope her mattress is lumpy and her pillow is fifteen degrees warmer than her room:

Also, guess what LMS my district uses?

There’s currently a screen up saying Canvas is undergoing “scheduled” maintenance, which … no. No, it isn’t.

#REVIEW: We Burned So Bright, by TJ Klune

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment
It’s his best book.

It’s his best book. It’s not super close, either; The House on the Cerulean Sea, which is still a book I love immensely, is going to have to be demoted.(*) I sobbed at the end of this book. I am not a sobber. I do not sob, Goddammit.

This book got me.

The story is simple, and told quickly; Bright is a novella, clocking in at only 176 pages, and I read it in a single sitting. The world is about to end, and there is nothing we can do about it; a rogue black hole has been identified in deep space and it is heading directly toward Earth. At the beginning of the book there is about a month left until the planet and every living thing on it ceases to exist. This could have been a huge, doorstopper story, but Klune keeps the focus tight: a married couple, Don and Rodney, who are both in their seventies and have been together for over forty years, and have one last road trip that they have to undertake, one last task that they must complete together, before the end of the world.

I’m not going to tell you much more than that. Klune takes his time revealing the reason for the trip, focusing mostly on Don and Rodney’s relationship and the small number of other people they encounter along the way, including a young family who have not told their children what is coming, a roving community of hippies, and one unfortunate young woman whose mind has broken under the strain of waiting for the apocalypse. It’s clear that there is danger out there; there are references to some areas under martial law, and one panicked flight from a gunfight, but the focus of this book isn’t on a world gone mad or a perilous journey. There are some obstacles to overcome, but this is a quiet book about a quiet pair of men; Klune isn’t interested in telling an action story here.

My sole gripe is minor, and may actually be wrong: I’m pretty sure that a rogue black hole heading toward Earth would not have some of the effects that this black hole has. There’s some fuckery with gravity going on toward the end that I found kind of distracting (and there’s some interesting discussion about said fuckery in the author’s afterword, as apparently how much fuckery to include was a point of contention between author, editor, and early readers) and the black hole manages to eat several other planets on the way to Earth, implying they were all in a nice neat little row for it. This is possible but doesn’t happen very often. The gravity stuff is within artistic license. I’ll live, is what I’m saying, and the only reason it got to me is that I’m an astronomy nerd. The emotional core of the book does not care one whit about what that black hole should be doing, and the emotional core of the book is going to kick you in the ass.

Even if you’ve never read any of Klune’s books before, absolutely pick this one up. Read it on a day when it’s raining outside and you have a few hours to yourself and maybe you’re a little sad. It’ll be worth it.

(*) Third, The Bones Beneath My Skin; fourth, Somewhere Beyond the Sea, then everything else.

This isn’t fair

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

These three books were waiting for me when I got home. That’s Sisters of the Lizard, the sequel to my ninth-favorite book of 2025, She Knows All the Names, the sequel to my twelfth-favorite book of 2025, and The Last Contract of Isako, the first book in a new trilogy by Fonda Lee, whose last trilogy was my favorite book of the year three fucking books in a row. And next week I get a new Dungeon Crawler Carl book, the latest book in a series that was first in my list of favorite books of 2025.

Come on, God damn it. Slow down. I read faster than 95% of the entire human race and that may be an understatement, and I can’t keep up with this shit. I need all the writers to get together and put themselves on a schedule. This is crazy.

#REVIEW: For Whom the Belle Tolls, by Jaysea Lynn

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I am tired, and I stayed home sick today, meaning that when I take my son’s graduation day off at the end of the year I’m going to get docked for it. I still feel kind of gross and don’t have a ton of energy, but I want to recognize this book for its Dungeon Crawler Carl level of “has no right to be this good.”

So, with that in mind, a two-sentence review: For Whom the Belle Tolls is, somehow, a warm, witty and delightful book about dying young from cancer and then living and working in Hell, and also about self-acceptance and found family. And hot sex with demons with ribbed cocks.

So, yeah. Maybe that convinces you to read it and maybe it doesn’t. But I had a much better time with this one than I would ever have imagined possible.

Unread Shelves: May 3, 2026

On By Luther M. SilerIn Photography, Reading1 Comment

I put the new bookshelves in place today— two full-size Billys from our friends at Ikea– and … sigh:

Sooooo much to read.

On knockoffs

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

So the Task that I was nattering about for a few days there was building the Lanter Fish— no, not a “lantern fish,” we’re going to respect the Chinese misspelling here– which represents the first not-a-Lego set I’ve ever ordered. And as you can see, it looks pretty fucking cool– the jaw moves up and down, and the little light is actually a light– the Amazon listing claims you can use it as a lamp, which is hilariously wrong, but it is an actual working light.

At 1038 pieces for $35 or so, it’s probably less than half of what you’d pay if it had LEGO on all of the pieces, and there are a couple of places where you’re going to suffer for that difference, because there are definitely some quality of life issues involved in putting this thing together that Lego ironed out years if not decades ago.

Let’s start with this, the contents of Bag 2:

Perhaps you haven’t put a Lego set together in a while: the pieces come in numbered bags, and there’s usually fifty to a hundred pieces in a bag, sometimes even fewer. This set had three big bags, each of which had five or six smaller bags inside that bag:

The problem is that, while I can see some organization in terms of which pieces were in which bag, that organization has nothing to do with the order they’re put together in, so you have to open all five of those bags right away, because the first three steps might involve pieces from all five bags. That means you’re sorting through hundreds of pieces to find whatever you may happen to be looking for for any given step, which slows everything way the hell down. I am not the type to pre-organize my pieces before building, but that feels way more essential with these sets. It took me easily twenty minutes of searching for one particular piece, which I eventually found stuck inside another piece. Now, that could happen with a Lego set too, but there would be a fifth as many pieces inside the bag, so it would still have been much easier to locate.

The other thing: I’ve occasionally wondered why Lego chooses the random colors they do for the pieces you can’t see, and have speculated that it was maybe a product of whatever they had a lot of lying around or something– was there a reason this piece was red and not blue? Sometimes the answer is yes, but in putting this set together I’ve realized a couple of other reasons to vary the colors:

  1. Easily 90 percent of this set is black(*), and any piece that isn’t black is going to be grey or dark brown, which blends in with black pretty damn well. The eyes are the only red pieces in the entire set. This makes it really hard to pick out individual small pieces in a pile of parts, especially when you’re stupid enough to try to build the set on a desk with a black surface, like I did.
  2. It helps with orientation when you’re looking at the instructions– not just “Okay, the 2×6 brick needs to be facing up,” but “the 2×6 blue brick needs to be facing up,” which is a big difference.

I spent a lot more time than usual pondering the instructions on this set and making small mistakes that I had to undo later, and it just led to more respect for the fucking geniuses Lego has creating their instruction manuals over there. They do this thing where all of the new pieces in a step are in color (mostly) and everything else is greyed out, and I can see why they decided to do that– it’s a lot easier to pick out the new parts, and one of the most common mistakes you will make with a Lego set is not noticing a specific part you were supposed to add on a certain step– but the printing quality of the manual was not high in the first place, and what it often meant was that the instructions were just hard to understand. There were also a few steps where you were building things in a way that would never fly in a Lego set, and instructions where you were adding things to the bottom of stuff you already had built, which was a huge pain in the ass.

That said? The lanter fish looks pretty fucking cool, and at that price I’ll put up with some nonsense.

(*) All black, yes, but a gorgeous, pearlescent black that is really hard to capture in pictures. I love the color of this thing.