Month: June 2019

Random Facebook PSA

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

I figured out something about Facebook, just a minute ago, that explains something that has been annoying me for months. I thought about sharing this on actual Facebook, but the blog post will get cross-posted there anyway so why not. Double blog day!

Anyway. Those of you who run Pages in addition to your personal site may have noticed something: Facebook helpfully informing you that your mom, or your wife, or someone else who you know good and goddamn well has Liked your page has commented on a post or something like that, and hey, wouldn’t it be great to invite those people to Like your page?

Well, sure, except they already do, and I know that, so please stop bothering me with this shit.

It’s one of those stupid things that gets on my nerves every once in a while– in other words, it’s everything about Facebook, an entire fucking ecosystem designed to do nothing but 1) allow me to have some small access to the lives of maybe literally five people who I’d completely fall out of touch with otherwise and 2) find endless ways to annoy me and/or utterly destroy society in the meanwhile.

I need to kill Luther’s Facebook page. This has been true for a while; my Clark Kent FB page has been gone for forever and is never coming back but those five people and the vague idea that the FB page drives traffic here has kept it around. I literally think about killing the page every day and don’t do it.

Anyway.

Here’s the thing I just figured out, since this wasn’t supposed to be an exclusively “bitch about Facebook” post: that list it’s drawing from, where it’s telling you to invite people to Like your page who have already Liked your page?

All of those people found your site on their own and were never invited to like it.

That’s why it’s repeating those names. It’s not comparing those people to the list of people who have Liked the page, it’s comparing them to a list of people who you have invited to Like the page. And if you never invited them because they are your wife and/or your mom and they did it right away when you first opened the page? Well, it’s gonna bug you about those people forever, as far as I know, because just because I understand why Facebook is doing the dumb and annoying thing it’s doing does not mean that the thing it’s doing is not still dumb and annoying, or that there’s any way to stop it from being dumb and annoying. It’s Facebook. Dumb and annoying are what it’s for.

But hey: at least I get it now. It’s stupid, but I get it. And so do you!

You may now go about your day.

Yikes

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments
Photo by Jason Wagner.

Midwesterners are occasionally not very smart people.

I was starting to get ready to put the boy to bed last night when suddenly the civil defense alarms started going off. Normally the alarms don’t happen until after the National Weather Service has already kicked out some watches and warnings, and I hadn’t seen anything, so I posted a quick message to Facebook asking if anybody knew anything and we went about our business. It took maybe another 10 minutes for my phone to start blowing up, and even when it did, it was all “radar indicates rotation” type of stuff and no actual someone sees a tornado types of warnings. I feel like now that they’re doing “radar indicates rotation” as a threat level, we need a new word for that. Tornado warning always meant someone has actually seen a funnel cloud to me and I don’t know how seriously to treat your radar tornadoes.

Anyway, we didn’t go hide in the bathtub, and we didn’t go into the basement. I’ve been living in tornado-prone areas for 3/4 of my life and I can count the number of times I’ve actually taken shelter during tornado warnings on one hand. I have never in all that time seen one with my own eyes, and the last time we were having tornado warnings I was literally outside taking video on my phone because the clouds were cool.

I am not alone in this, mind you. This is a Midwestern thing. We are used to this shit– if anything, too used to this shit. By the time the warnings were really starting to show up, it was barely even raining at my house any longer, so we didn’t go anywhere.

So, uh, that building in that picture up there is maybe a five-minute drive from my house. It used to be a day care– not my son’s day care, but we’ve tried to get him in there a couple of times because it’s more convenient to where we live than anywhere else we’ve installed him. And it’s, uh, gone now, because tornado. Luckily said tornado was at 8:30 on a Sunday night so the building was deserted.

Maybe next time we’ll go hang out in the basement for five minutes.

STATION IDENTIFICATION: Infinitefreetime.com

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

I’m Luther Siler.  I’m an author.  Welcome to my blog, infinitefreetime.com.

I’ve written several books you might be interested in, ranging from short story collections to near-future science fiction to fantasy space opera to nonfiction, all available as ebooks or in print from Amazon.  Autographed books can be ordered straight from me as well.

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Thanks for reading!

Prostetnic hi-res cropped

On my life of luxury

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Now that we are … y’know, pool people, and now that it’s starting to be warm enough that actually using the thing without freezing to death is a possibility, man, this was the right call. It’s still cold, mind you– I actually had to kick the boy out after a while because he lacks his father’s insulating layers of body hair and fat and the shivering was getting to the point where I felt like it was probably kind of dangerous. But man, it has been nice the two or three times I’ve been able to use it this week. Seriously consider getting yourself one of these things if you have a few hundred dollars to spare and some level lawn space, y’all. Life-changing.

My wife is leaving me and heading off to Boston to do work stuff for a week, so it’ll just be the boy and I around here for the next several days. My goal is that the two of us not spend the entire time playing video games. I have actually done pretty well in sticking to the goals I set at the beginning of this week. I’m a little bit behind on the wordcount I wanted, which will surprise absolutely no one, but it’s at least happening. Which is progress, right? Feel free to encourage me to continue by buying a book if you’re so inclined. They’re cheap!

The goal right now is to have enough written by InConJunction in a couple of weeks that reading an excerpt at some point is a viable possibility. I don’t know for sure if I’m going to have a panel schedule or not, but I volunteered for a bunch of them so there ought to be something. I will keep everyone updated, of course.

On the best possible use of my time

On By Luther M. SilerIn art, Writing1 Comment

The book doesn’t have a real title or a cover and only has like 1400 words right now but hell let’s spend an hour fiddling around with title logos just because. Why not, right?

In which I know nothing, but talk anyway

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

More politics! More politics!

What can I say, it’s been that kind of week.

So here’s the thing: it is impossible– completely, flatly impossible– to get the Democratic nomination without substantial support from the African-American community, and in particular without support from black women. Go ahead, if you like, and look through my posts about the 2016 primary: you will discover, as I quickly did, that one of the reasons Hillary Clinton’s nomination was damn near inevitable after a while was that Bernie reliably lost any state that had fewer than (if I remember right) 60% or so white voters. The only exception to this rule was Hawai’i, which is heavily nonwhite but is heavily Asian and Pacific Islander and not so much as black and Latino as the rest of the country.

It’s no secret that Buttigieg’s base is well-off white liberals. This is not, in and of itself, bad– that was actually Obama’s base when he started his presidential run too, and look how that turned out. But while Obama definitely had to convince black voters of his viability, he was never literally polling at zero percent with them. Pete is, at least in South Carolina, and I suspect in a whole lot of Super Tuesday states as well.

So obviously what he really needed right now was to mishandle it when a racist cop murdered a black person in South Bend.

(Don’t bother arguing with me about this. No body cam means the cop is guilty. If I end up sitting on the jury you can talk to me about bias. Until then, fuck this guy. Cops lie, and I am going to be 100% on the side of the dead people for the foreseeable future until America’s police forces clean house.)

So Pete’s done. It’s all over but the shouting at this point. Much like Sanders, his path to the nomination is basically closed without black support and statistically speaking he doesn’t have any. I do not, at this point, see that changing. He hasn’t put in the work and he keeps shooting himself in the foot.

What about Biden?

Joey Jo-Jo Junior Shabadoo is currently commanding the lion’s share of the black vote, much like he’s commanding the lion’s share of the polling in general. I went on a tear trying to find a Biden supporter yesterday and eventually managed to find one person who admitted after two tweets that he was her #1 choice but she couldn’t name anyone else running as a Dem.

I’m not actually criticizing this person. There’s a long goddamn time until any voting starts, and frankly it’s probably smarter to tune all of the nonsense out right now. No grief from me about this. But it really makes me wonder how soft Biden’s support actually is. And he spent yesterday saying all sorts of nice things about segregationists and how they never called him “boy.”

Candidates who they would have called “boy” had some things to say about that, as well you might fucking expect.

This is what I meant, yesterday, when I said that Biden has done his level best since deciding to run trying to erase any goodwill I ever felt for him. We can’t just Kumbaya our way to governance, no, we have to choose some of the worst possible examples we possibly can of literally evil Senators who he got along with just fine. The man has the instincts of a headless turkey and given that he’s run for office several times before on his own and never gotten close to the nomination I have to feel like he’s going to continue fucking up and voters are going to start looking elsewhere. And if you want to fuck up your numbers with the black community, there are probably a few ways more effective than telling everybody how well you got along with people who praised Emmitt Till’s murderers but you’re gonna have to work at it a bit.

The interesting question: assuming the voters do flee, where do they end up? Obviously I’d hope they end up with Harris or Warren, but anything can happen. There’s always the electability argument, which I think is mostly bullshit (Biden is polling best against the Current Occupant for the same reason he’s on top of the primary polls: everyone knows who he is) but has the advantage of being simple and truthy.

Only seventeen more months of this shit to go, y’all!

Democratic POTUS Candidates Loosely Ranked, June 2019 Pre-Debate edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn PoliticsLeave a comment

Let’s be clear here: right there in that picture is the ticket I want, and I don’t much care what order their names are in. I haven’t updated this since March, mostly because not a whole lot has happened to change things other than that my affection for Warren and Harris has continued to grow. I once told a phonebanker that I would drag my nuts across a mile of broken glass to ensure that I voted for Barack Obama; I’m not quite at that level yet but I’m certainly getting there. And, really, once you get past these two, there’s not a whole lot of talking to do.

SECOND TIER: In no particular order, Inslee, Gillibrand, O’Rourke, who hasn’t annoyed me in a while, and Castro. I don’t think any of these four will be the nominee but I’d be perfectly fine if it happened.

THIRD TIER: Klobuchar and Booker.

YOU FUCKERS AREN’T EVEN REAL PEOPLE, RUN FOR SOMETHING YOU HAVE A CHANCE TO WIN: de Blasio, Ryan, Hickenlooper, Delaney, Williamson, Yang, Bennet, Swalwell, and that Montana jackass who announced his campaign in May and thinks it’s a sign of a conspiracy that he isn’t in the debates. These folks don’t count at all and they’re a distraction to the process. I only know they exist because I copied their names from the debate lineup and I couldn’t pick any of them out of a lineup. After the first debate they need to all drop out.

HA HA, BYE, ASSHOLE: That Starbucks dickhead, who I think dropped out finally.

STILL DON’T WANT TO VOTE FOR YOU BUT YOU HAVEN’T PISSED ME OFF ANY MORE THAN USUAL LATELY: Sanders and Gabbard.

FUCK THESE GUYS: Biden and Buttigieg, who are probably going to end up being the fucking ticket. Biden, in particular, who I wasn’t excited about running for office but certainly didn’t dislike six months ago, has done every single thing he can to keep me from generating even the slightest whiff of enthusiasm for his campaign, including praising motherfucking James Eastland today. He clearly learned nothing from being Obama’s Vice-President for 8 years and still thinks that Republicans are just misunderstood nice folks who can be negotiated with if we just all come together. Well, they aren’t and they can’t, not anymore, and not recognizing that basic fact about the state of politics in this country right now is disqualifying for the Democratic candidate. Combine that with overt, undeniable sexism and an utter inability to keep his fucking hands to himself and this is not someone I want to vote for. He may even be legitimately lower than Sanders at this point. Plus, he’s getting the same kind of support that that one asshole who lost my most recent Congressional race did– in other words, he’s on top of the polls for some reason but hell if I can find even a single person anywhere who thinks of him as their top candidate. I asked Twitter about this earlier:

https://twitter.com/nfinitefreetime/status/1141394461488009216

Not one response, other than a guy who said he wasn’t in his top 5. This guy has to have some fans somewhere. Who the hell are they?

Buttigieg, on the other hand, was once right behind Harris and Warren, and has spent most of his time since then basically doing the same shit Biden’s doing except at lower volume and without the handsiness. He’s a step above Biden and Sanders, certainly, but he’s drawing from the same Kumbaya school of thought about where we are right now and I’m not fucking having it. His reluctance if not outright refusal to release anything resembling actual policies is also starting to get on my nerves, particularly when stacked up against Warren, who I think at this point probably has a detailed plan for alien invasion, the Yellowstone caldera erupting, and multiple varieties of zombie attack. He probably doesn’t belong in the same tier as Biden if I’m being honest but I’ve still spent most of my time thinking about him lately being annoyed by whatever he did most recently. Another difference: I know people who are fervent supporters. I know where his people are coming from. Not the case with Joe. Seriously, if you consider yourself a big fan of his, identify yourself. I promise I’ll be nice.

Will there be a liveblog of the debates next week? Yeah, chances are there will.

Who won the pool?

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

If you had “day two of summer break” as your prediction for When Will Luther Collapse Into a Lifeless Puddle of Body Fluids, Trans Fats and Regret, you are a winner! Collect your prize on the way to literally anywhere else, because ain’t nothing going on over here right now.