I’m just saying

On August 16, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized1 Comment

Motherfucking water

On August 16, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy5 Comments

Motherfucking rain motherfucking crawl space motherfucking al gore motherfuck fuckery fucking fuck.

In which I’m not judging

On August 14, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Work3 Comments

… well, okay, I probably am. But I’m really trying not to judge. Especially since the thing I’m being judgy about directly benefits me. So take this post with as much salt as you feel necessary. I probably shouldn’t even be writing it.

(He said, before continuing to write.)

This was a slow week at work. I was closing about the same number of sales as anyone else, but for whatever reason it seemed like most of my sales ended up for low-dollar items and not anything really worth writing home about. When I make 5% commission on sales I can’t get too excited about selling a $200 bed to somebody, right? And the couple of bigger opportunities I had this week I wasn’t able to close for one reason or another. I walked into work today needing a great day in order to end up with an average week.

And, well, I got it, ending the day with a sale that ended up being damn near seven thousand dollars after taxes and delivery– my current high-water mark for a single sale. It was a mother and daughter, a random walk-in off the street, and they were setting up her new apartment for when she starts college. She literally got new stuff for every room of the house; a living room set, a bedroom set, a dining table and chairs, some chairs for the bar, the works. And then as I’m going over everything with them to make sure I didn’t miss anything, Mom says “Oh, did we buy you a desk?” And we hadn’t, so we went and looked at desks.

And this 19-year-old kid picks out a thousand dollar executive desk. And for some reason that was the detail that had me questioning the sanity of the entire endeavor. You know this kid’s gonna move, like, five times in the next eight years, right? Do you really want to be dropping this kind of cash on a houseful of Grown Person Shit so that she and her friends can fornicate and puke on it for the next four years? How many times do you want to move that heavy-assed executive desk? A king-size storage bed? For a 19-year-old?

And then Mom drops $5000 in cash on my desk in front of me and writes a check for the remainder, and it hit me: I’m looking at this all wrong, because these people clearly have so much goddamn money that it doesn’t matter if she wrecks it. She can leave that shit in the apartment and just move and they can afford to completely re-outfit her in her next place. They’ve got money like that. It doesn’t matter.

I suspect, what with Notre Dame starting back up in the next couple of weeks, that this is not going to be the last time I experience this. And, as someone who just made something like $315 for like twenty minutes of not-very-hard work for these (it should be pointed out, very nice*) people, it’s not like I have a lot of room to complain. But… damn. Some of these folks just do not live like me, y’know?

(*) Mom, after the “do you need a desk?” moment, actually looked at me and apologized for “being such pains in the ass.” I looked her straight in the eye and told her that at the amount she was spending I was willing to put up with about fifteen times as much pain in the ass before it became a problem, and I wasn’t kidding.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On August 14, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m Luther Siler. I’m a writer and an editor. Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I’m the author of Skylights, available for $4.95 from Amazon, and The Benevolence Archives. Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1 is 99 cents from Amazon. Volume 2, The Sanctum of the Sphere, is $4.95. All three books are available in print as well, and the print edition of Sanctum includes BA 1 as a bonus! My newest book is a nonfiction memoir about teaching called Searching for Malumba: Why Teaching is Terrible, and Why We Do It Anyway. The ebook is $4.95 and the print edition is $15.95.

Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.

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.
Sign up for my mailing list here.
My author page on Goodreads is here. I accept any and all friend requests.
I have a Tumblr! I don’t actually know what Tumblr is, because I’m old, but I’ve got one.
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.
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!

#Review: SUICIDE SQUAD

On August 13, 2016August 12, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Reviews3 Comments

The short and sweet version of this review I’ve already put on Twitter: SUICIDE SQUAD is basically exactly the movie I thought it was (and it’s probably the movie you think it is, too) except maybe 20% better than I thought it was going to be. Maybe 15; it’s hard to say.

I’m hard on DC movies. Basically I’ve hated every film DC has done since, oh, the very first Michael Keaton BATMAN movie, and even that one hasn’t held up terribly well. I absolutely hated BAT-THEMED NINJA KILLER, and didn’t see either of the sequels, including the one that Heath Ledger was supposedly so good in. I missed ANGRY ALIEN MURDER DEITY on its opening weekend, decided not to see it based on that opening weekend, and then left the room halfway through when we decided to rent it months later. If I ever see BAT-THEMED NINJA KILLER VS. ANGRY ALIEN MURDER DEITY, it will be to liveblog how much I hate it. I would like for DC to make good movies. I like their characters. I just wish they’d put their characters in their movies.

Oh, and I’ll probably see WONDER WOMAN.

But anyway.

There are bits of SUICIDE SQUAD that are interesting. The acting, especially, is uniformly good, surprisingly so in fact; I enjoyed all of the performances except for Adewale Akinnouye-Agbaje’s Killer Croc and Joel Kinnaman’s Patriotic Hero #3; Akinnouye-Agbaje appears to have been given no direction other than “be a shark, only, like, really black, but a white guy’s idea of really black” and Kinnaman’s character is so white and blond that he’s entirely forgettable. I have no gripes about Jared Leto’s Joker other than that if you’ve seen any ten seconds of his performance you’ve kind of seen the whole thing. Margot Robbie is fine as Harley Quinn, and Will Smith’s Deadshot is pretty good too. Cara Delevigne is the standout as the Enchantress, a deeply weird character whose entire character needs to be embodied in physical movement because she doesn’t talk too much. Oh, and they cast Amanda Waller as Amanda Waller somehow. That was cool.

There’s splody stuff; the splody stuff isn’t bad. The story is a bit too high-stakes for the movie it’s in; it’s one of those “there is no way other heroes aren’t showing up here” stories, and they make sure to let you know that the destruction takes place over a few days so there’s absolutely no excuse for, for example, the Flash to not show up. I feel like a good Suicide Squad movie is something covert and deniable, not “hey, go try and fight this mystical world-ending being with, like, your wood baseball bat and a sharpened boomerang, because that’ll work.”

Oh, and Ben Affleck’s chin is in it, too. Ben Affleck’s chin is the worst thing about Ben Affleck’s Batman. There’s no way anyone would ever call that guy Batman. He’d be Chin Guy. Affleck’s chin looks ridiculous in that costume in a way that no one else’s chin has; I can’t figure out what’s so weird about it.

I dunno. Ultimately, this wasn’t a bad way to spend two hours, and if you’re inclined to see it but haven’t seen it yet, you probably ought to go ahead and go do that, but if you were inclined to not see it don’t trip over your feet running to the theater either. I didn’t hate it, which makes it the best DC movie since I was in high school.

Damning with faint praise, I know. But they can’t all be Iron Man, and they can’t all be Snowpiercer either, y’know?

On what I’m not doing right now

On August 12, 2016August 12, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

For the last fifteen years, the week before school starts has been, hands down and far away, the busiest week of the year. The “first day for teachers” at my old district is next Tuesday, meaning that every teacher I know has been back to work for a week already, and the kids start back next Wednesday. My son starts back to school on Friday.

Summer’s over, folks, and my schedule will change barely at all. I’ll have to get up a bit earlier, since I’ll start needing to have the boy at school at 8:15 or so rather than at day care at 8:45 or so, but other than that (and finding something to do with the extra minutes I’ll acquire between dropping him off and getting to work at nine) I have no special responsibilities at all this week.

I am torn between a weird sort of wistful nostalgia and this:

Let me make it clear: I support my former co-workers in everything. I got y’all’s back.

It just looks like pointing and laughing.

It’s 4:10 PM…

On August 11, 2016August 11, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading6 Comments

…and I’m making a pot of coffee. I managed to land another two-day weekend, my second of the past eight weeks, only I didn’t know that I was getting it until showing up to OtherJob yesterday to pick up my paycheck and noticing I wasn’t on the schedule.

I am emphatically not complaining. So far today my activities have included finishing a book I was reading and taking a long nap and not bothering to shower until 2:30, so I’m working hard.

*stares into space for literally twenty-three minutes*

*gets up and gets coffee, drinks half a cup*

So. Yeah.

Let’s talk about that book for a minute, actually, although this isn’t going to rise to the level of a review: Nemesis Games, the fifth book in James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series, and the book that is, I think, finally going to get me started on buying the series in hardcover once volume 6 comes out in December. In some ways, Nemesis is a sloppy mess of a book; I don’t know if it’s because I was trying to read it as an author or what, but it’s clear for the majority of the book that a) there’s a lot of deliberate moving around of chess pieces so that the right characters can be in the (improbably) right places for the action of the book to move forward, and b) this isn’t a book itself so much as a setup for the next book or, more likely, the next couple of books. I feel like you can see the architecture on this one in a way you can’t with most books and you haven’t been able to in the previous four Expanse novels.

That probably sounds like a complaint, so let me follow it up by saying that Nemesis Games surprised me in a way that I haven’t been surprised since reading A Game of Thrones for the first time, and that it’s virtually impossible to talk about the book in any detail without spoiling how Corey wipes the status quo almost completely clean and throws every corner of his(*) universe into turmoil by the end of the book, only to then turn around and introduce a whole new problem in the final chapter of the book. It’s a hell of an ambitious thing, Nemesis Games is, and even if the story wasn’t as compelling as it was I’d respect the hell out of it for what it managed to do. My wife read it before I did, and she’s been chewing her nails for weeks waiting for me to get around to it since she wanted to talk about it and refused to tell me anything before I’d finished the book. That’s compelling, guys. Like I said, the book’s kind of a mess as a standalone artifact, but maybe as book 5 of what is probably a series with no planned end it doesn’t need to be. I mean, it’s not like anyone’s starting with Book 5, right?

…you should probably read these books, is what I’m saying. There’s a season of TV floating around out there that you should get into, too, as it’s quality stuff, even if the TV version of Amos is fighting with the Amos in my head in a way I don’t like. My Amos is better and he needs to win.

(*) James S.A. Corey is actually two people, but saying “their” in this context feels weird. They’re both dudes, so “he” it is.