#Halloween costume test, stage one

On October 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Parenting6 Comments

H IMG_20141026_183324934 mm.

Here’s my plan for Halloween this year: my son is insanely excited about the holiday, so I’m dressing up too, for the first time since, I think, 1999. Halloween used to be my favorite holiday. It has not been, for many years, but the boy’s enthusiasm has been infectious and there seems to finally be a backlash happening against the onslaught of obnoxious “sexy XXX” costumes that have been plaguing the holiday for the last too many years.

The idea is this: Walk around with the boy and my wife a bit, and then stay outside my own house to pass out candy. We have two large and excitable dogs, so past practice has been to keep the candy outside so that we don’t have lots of doorbell-ringing and door-opening and there’s no chance of one of the animals getting past us and getting someone hurt. We generally have a bowl full of the traditional stuff and I buy a dozen or so actual candy bars for kids with exceptionally good costumes.

Things I still need: black sweat pants (I’m sure I have a pair, I just need to find them), black shoes (don’t even need to find those), zipties. You can’t see it, but the second set of chains-n-hooks is being worn as a belt– I’m going to ziptie them together so that I don’t have to try and tie plastic chains. The first set is actually threaded through the sleeves of the outer robe so that they dangle by my hands, which I think is a pretty neat trick.

Unfortunately, I probably need a new mask, too. While I like the idea of the mirror mask, and it’s suitably creepy, I’m actually still kind of having a panic attack from trying to breathe in the thing and while I’m planning to wear contact lenses while I’ve got it on, visibility is still a real problem. Plus, if you look closely at the picture, you can still see big chunks of my neck and what I’ll try to pretend aren’t extra chins, and that’s not the look I’m going for. I found a decent old man mask at Target that was basically mask for the upper half of the face and a lot of beard for the lower half, and I feel like that ought to do the job just as well, or I could always go with some sort of monster look. There’s no way I make it two hours in the mirrored one, cool as it looks.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On October 26, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

Hi! I’m Luther Siler. I’m the author of Skylights and The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1, both available at various ebook retailers easily accessible from whatever magic rectangle you’re using to access this page. I’ve decided to start doing periodic– maybe once or twice per month– reminders on the main page of the blog of the various places I can be found on the Interwebs. Between Twitter and the blog I probably add 100 or so new followers a month, so it’s probably a useful thing for new readers. Regular folks, if you see the STATION IDENTIFICATION tag, feel free to ignore it.

So here’s where to find Luther Siler on the interwebtron:

You can follow me on Twitter, @nfinitefreetime, here or just click the “follow” button on the right side of the page. I am on Twitter pretty frequently; I use it for liveblogging TV, whining about anything that strikes me as whine-worthy, and for short, Facebook-style posts. I generally follow back if I can tell you’re a human being. You are not a human being if your profile mentions SEO.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I am accepting any and all friend requests at the moment. I am looking forward to the day when my Goodreads account has more friends than my Facebook account; it won’t be long.
My official Author page on Amazon is located here.
Feel free to Like the (sadly underutilized) Luther Siler Facebook page here. It’s mostly used as a reblogger for posts here.
And, of course, you’re already at infinitefreetime.com, my blog. You can click here to be taken to a random post.

Thanks for reading!

In which it’s all good

On October 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

It was an excessively pleasant day today, with October-perfect weather. We went out and bought pumpkins (the boy picked all three of them out) and the boy is so enamored with his personal pumpkin that he insisted on it staying in his bedroom with him tonight. We got the yard raked and I enjoyed it (it is so rare as to border on impossible for me to enjoy doing yard work) and acquired most of the rest of his Halloween costume. We also figured out what I was doing about my Halloween costume, which I didn’t actually realize I was wearing until the idea popped into my head.

And now we’re gonna watch the season premiere of Constantine. So, yeah, good day.

(Not “good blog post,” I admit that. I’ll try and be interesting tomorrow.)

Burning bush

On October 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography1 Comment

I love these.

Make with the clicking

On October 25, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn ReviewsLeave a comment

My review of last week’s WALKING DEAD is up at Sourcerer.

On that password protected post…

On October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting, Photography6 Comments

So my son, who has been obsessed with scarecrows lately, just spent a while outside playing his “stand by the tree and pretend to kick hats” game. Only this time he did it with the straw hat we’re using as part of his Halloween costume on.

I thought it was cute. I took a picture of it. And then, after making sure that certain identifying details like my house number weren’t exposed in the picture, and after thinking about it a bit, I posted it on the blog.

There aren’t that many pictures of my son on here. There are a couple of posts specifically dedicated to parenting that include pictures, but in general I try to err on the side of not posting pictures of him here unless I have a reasonably good reason. I felt like this picture was cute and funny enough that it was worth it.

And then, an hour or so later, I got a Twitter notification that an online newspaper website was sharing some of my content. “Oh, cool!” I thought, going to look, wondering which of my recent posts they were sharing and sort of hoping it was the series on school clothes.

It was the picture of my son that I’d shared.

It was listed under “Adult.”

Now, I’m willing to believe that the category was a mistake of some sort, or even possibly auto-generated based on some sort of ‘bot trolling the site– I do use an awful lot of profanity around here, right? But it was a picture of a three-year-old in a silly hat standing next to a scarecrow. And I understand how the Internet works, too, and how once you put something out there what people do with it isn’t really up to you. Hell, once I tag this post it will probably auto-populate something with a picture of him in the links at the bottom of the page. And in some way I actually sort of appreciate whoever it was that shared the picture– these sites don’t pull their content out of nowhere; someone had to submit the picture for inclusion, and then an editor thought it was cute or funny or something and slotted it in. And I appreciate both of those things.

But still. No thanks. Even without the “Adult” issue, there are nearly nine hundred damn posts on this blog– I think #900 will come tomorrow, and this may well be it if I’m wrong– and I think I’d prefer it if any posts that get shared out off of my own little corner of the internet not be pictures of my kid.

The password is my real name, by the way. No caps, shortened form, no spaces.

This may be another idiot parent moment; I dunno. But nonetheless:

Protected: Pop quiz

On October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Photography

Your Friday blogwank

On October 24, 2014October 24, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn BlogwankingLeave a comment

So apparently one of the ways to get long-term attention paid to a post is to write an incredibly negative review of a critically-acclaimed, yet irredeemably terrible movie. There’s been a weird resurgence of interest in the SNOWPIERCER review over the last couple of weeks that I find vaguely fascinating, especially since my referrer logs don’t seem to think it’s all coming from one place, and if it keeps up the post will have more views in October than it did the month it actually came out. Have a look: