Month: July 2021

Maybe don’t Google this

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, lifeLeave a comment

Here’s a sentence not many people can say: my eye doctor diagnosed me with sleep apnea. That’s completely true, although I don’t think I have it and I have no diagnosis yet from someone whose diagnosis might count. I had an eye appointment a couple of weeks ago, as I’m less happy with the long-term results of my LASIK than I feel like I ought to be and requested a consult. My eye doc then proceeded to confuse the crap out of me by asking repeatedly if I’d ever been diagnosed with sleep apnea, or if I had experienced various and sundry symptoms of sleep apnea, or if I’d ever had a sleep study done.

The answer to all of these questions was no. I absolutely utterly completely can not fall asleep on my back, and am an occasional mild snorer according to my wife, but that’s it. It turns out, though, that I have a severe case of something called “floppy eyelid syndrome,” which I did a GIS for to grab an image for this post and which you should absolutely not do a GIS for. Basically what this means is that my eyelids stretch way more than a normal person’s, which sounds like it shouldn’t be a thing, but it is. I can basically expose the entire orb of my eye if I want to, which I don’t, but it’s possible. And it turns out that you’re not supposed to be able to do that, and it’s not just a party trick, it’s a syndrome.

That’s not the weird thing, though. The weird thing is that floppy eyelid syndrome is very highly correlated with sleep apnea. Nearly 100%, in fact: in other words, nearly 100% of people with floppy eyelid syndrome also have sleep apnea, to the point where it’s actually used as a diagnostic marker for sleep apnea. So my eye doctor suggested I talk to my GP, and as it turned out I had already scheduled a doctor’s appointment a few days later, and my GP shrugged and went ahead and scheduled me for the study, which insurance then denied.

Like, I would like to be able to sleep on my back, but not at the expense of having to strap a CPAP machine to my face while I’m sleeping. My stomach or my side work just fine, thanks. But at the same time I feel like I ought to take this seriously in case it becomes a Thing later on, right? So if they tell me to do a home sleep study, whatever that is, I’ll do it. And in the meantime, I guess I’ll refrain from pulling my eyelids back any further than I need to to put my eyedrops in.

High-pressure sales tactics

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing1 Comment

I said it was happening, and yep, it’s happening: My novel Click is even as we speak being approved by Amazon’s fooferall machines and will be available for humans to buy in the very near future. Official release date is July 26, but it’ll be available for preorder soon, and as soon as the fooferall process concludes I will actually have a link you can click on to order it.

This isn’t even the official announcement post, really, because if it was there would be a link. This is like that card you get before a wedding announcement, that tells you there’s a wedding announcement coming and to hold a date, but somehow is not, itself, either the announcement or the invitation. This is just the announcement that there’s gonna be a book and that you should be prepared to buy it, if you like.

In other news, my YouTube channel is still out there and I’m still having fun with it, so you should go look at that and hit Subscribe as quickly as possible. Am I talking about it too much? Yes, absolutely– but if I don’t, no one will know about the great fun we’re having with Chicory: A Colorful Tale over there. And that one doesn’t even cost you any money! Go do it.

In other other news, the prophesied Second Child has entered the house, and I’m realizing as I’m typing this that I don’t currently hear any screaming, so either the children are both dead or they have gone somewhere without my knowledge, which seems like it could possibly be an alarming development. I don’t know where my wife is either, though, so maybe she’s with them.

(Thudding in the hallway)

Okay, I guess it’s fine now.

My sleep study has been canceled, because, I shit you not, my insurance company has deemed me “not sick enough” to require one, which … man, that’s a whole entire rant, right there, and I’m going to not bother writing the majority of it because the fact is I don’t think I have sleep apnea and not having to spend Thursday night in a hospital makes the rest of my week easier. Instead, at some as-yet-undetermined point in the future I have to do a home sleep study, and if you happen to know what the hell that might involve, let me know, because I haven’t gotten around to Googling it yet. Fact is I have got shit to do, and taking an entire night in a hospital bed hooked up to machines and pretending to sleep off my plate makes the chances that all the other stuff will actually get done a lot higher. Tomorrow’s tasks involve finding presents for my cousin’s two children, one of whom I’ve never met, and getting all of my video recording for the entire weekend done and out of the way. None of that can really start until the extra child is out of the house, and there may be a trip to the county fair in there sometime as well. I’m bringing my laptop to Michigan with me so I can keep up with bloggery, but if there’s anybody out there thinking hey, I would really love to write a piece to promote something for infinitefreetime on, like, no notice at all, let me know.

In which I don’t know what’s going on

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

It has been one of those days— and, I suspect, this is going to be a pattern that’s not going away anytime soon– where never at any point was I really sure what day it was, or what, if anything, I’m supposed to be doing. I’m going to have an extra child in my house all day tomorrow, and two days after that I have a sleep study, then I’m out of town for three days, and the week after that I have a three-day work thing, then a couple of one-day work things the week after that, and then it’s August and pretty much the second August 1 hits I’m off to the races, because school starts the 11th, I think, and I have stuff to do nearly every day of August before then.

All of this is just to say that I spent today either in the pool, finally framing my wife’s Christmas present, or recording myself playing the vidya games, and other than never being quite sure what day it was, I am perfectly content with how the day went.

I have an enormous amount of stuff I want to accomplish before Child 2 arrives tomorrow; anybody want to take bets on whether I get any of it done?

45

On By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I have had worse birthdays.

(I have rarely had better presents– in thirteen days, I get to pet a rhinoceros. My wife is amazing.)

A Fourth of July factoid

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

Many of you probably know this, either because you’re history buffs like me or you’ve seen me mention it here before or you saw it somewhere else today, as this is going to be far from the only place to learn this today.

But!

One of my favorite stupid party tricks is that I can always tell you how old America is without having to do the math. My birthday is tomorrow, and I was born on July 5, 1976, meaning I was born the day after America’s bicentennial. I therefore can determine America’s age by just adding 200 to my own rather than dealing with any piddling subtraction like some sort of heathen.

But I have another trick! I can also, by adding 150 to my age, tell you how many years it has been since both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died. You see, the two men both died on the same day– and not only did they die on the same day, but it was July 4, 1826– in other words, on America’s 50th birthday.

Jefferson’s last words were “Is it the Fourth?”

Adams, who always thought America should celebrate its birthday on July 2 because he was a contrary old bastard like that (hot take: Adams was the Bernie Sanders of the 1700s,) didn’t give a damn about dying on the Fourth, but his last words were “Thomas Jefferson survives.” He was wrong. Jefferson had been dead for a few hours, but, y’know, 1826. I don’t know how long it took for the knowledge of Jefferson’s death to make it from Virginia to Massachusetts, but it was probably at least a week or so, and I imagine it took a minute to determine which man had actually passed away first.

And now you know something about what happened 195 years ago today.

#REVIEW: First, Become Ashes by K.M. Szpara

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I have to start this piece the same way I began my review of K.M. Szpara’s Docile, which is with a content warning for All of the Things. If you have ever seen a content warning on anything and thought “Yeah, I don’t need this,” it’s fair to say that K.M. Szpara’s work is not going to be for you, and given that both of his books so far have been standalone and required the same content warnings, it’s probably safe to decide that things like rape, sexual assault and torture are probably going to be themes that his entire body of work is going to be dealing with and walk away. And that’s fine. Nobody has time to read everything even if we wanted to, and you never have to justify choosing not to spend your money and your time on something.

For what it’s worth, First, Become Ashes is, for me at least, a less traumatizing read than Docile was. This book is the story of Meadowlark, a 24-year-old who was raised in a cult that lives in a converted zoo in the middle of Baltimore (Baltimore? I think it was Baltimore. Some city, it doesn’t really matter) called the Fellowship of the Anointed. Lark is raised to believe that he has magical abilities, that the outside world– which is more or less indistinguishable from our modern world– is full of monsters and evil beings, and that on his 25th birthday he will venture forth from the Fellowship’s headquarters to go on a quest and slay a monster. His partner Kane, a month older than him, leaves on his quest, and two weeks later the FBI raids the compound and takes everyone into custody.

(One common theme of the criticism of this book is that the book utterly ignores the other members of the cult– suggested to be dozens of people, at least– while just following the handful of main characters, and that’s fair. Don’t expect to find out what happened to anyone other than the two-and-a-half or so POV characters who were inside the walls.)

That’s just the setup, of course. Lark escapes FBI … I’m gonna say custody, because while he’s not being charged with anything it’s always pretty clear that they don’t want him to leave— and tries to go on his quest anyway, and it turns out that Kane was instrumental in bringing the FBI down on the Fellowship, and Lark gets hooked up with some cosplayers, of all people, who help him out on his quest, and this is the part where the book is a little more palatable than Docile, because there’s at least some consensual sex in this thing(*). And of course the FBI is trying to bring him back in, and it turns out that one of the cosplayers he hooks up with has a very large online following, so there’s this whole influencer layer on top of that as these two enlist their online communities to help Lark out.

The book plays very coy throughout most of its length with whether the Fellowship actually has magical abilities or not, which is what tilts this book from trauma fiction into the fantasy genre. Lark is forever trying to cast spells to protect himself, to ward or unlock or lock doors, and to communicate with other Fellowship members who are far away, and … sometimes they seem to work? And sometimes they don’t, but he usually has reasons why they don’t? And sometimes other people are like “Oh, this is what must have happened,” and maybe that was it but maybe Lark actually can do magic? And because this is a K.M. Szpara book it turns out that the way your magical abilities are unlocked and restored is through pain, because we can’t not have some sadomasochism in the mix. The question is, I think, finally actually resolved at the end of the book, but I won’t spoil how.

As I said, this is in some ways an easier book to read than Docile was, and partially because of that it’s more straightforwardly enjoyable than Docile was, although I’m not convinced it’s a better book, because I think Docile was a little more intellectually interesting than First, Become Ashes ended up being. If you read and enjoyed Docile, I’d definitely suggest checking this book out as well, but if you passed on the first it’s probably safe to pass on this as well. I don’t know that this will end up on my best-of list at the end of the year, but I read it in a day and barely put it down, so that’s got to count for something.

(*) I had this half-assed theory while I was reading Docile that the sex in the book, which was one hundred percent nonconsensual, was meant to be alienating to the reader, and it still kind of weirds me out to see people describe that book as erotica. This book is more unambiguously erotica than Docile, because at least two of Lark’s partners are consensual. There are still some moments in the book that are unquestionably rape and/or assault, though, so don’t let that drag you into a feeling of safety; this book still earns its content warnings.

See you tomorrow

On By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

It’s nearly 8:00, and I haven’t blogged today, so apparently I’m not gonna? I’ve got people in town (no, really!) so I’m going to be social instead of bloggery.

I did finish a book today that I want to write about tomorrow, though.

An announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

You may recall that I have written books in the past.

My novel Click has been an exclusive for Patreon subscribers and people who buy it from me at conventions since its publication. It has struck me recently (and has been true for some time) that this no longer really makes any sense; my Patreon rapidly grew to sixteen followers and froze there– I don’t think I’ve added a single follower since the first month I was on the site– and I haven’t updated it in forever. Similarly, Covid has made cons impossible. So this means that this book, more or less by definition, is just sitting there, not doing me any good.

I’m going to continue to offer it as an initial reward to new Patreon people, but it’s losing its exclusivity in the very near future, as I’m going to make the ebook version at least available on Amazon. Right now the print version is being handled through someone other than KDP, and I need to figure out if they can play nice with each other, and the actual file (not the text, the file) needs some slight revision, so I don’t have a release date just yet– but probably in the next few weeks. I will, of course, let everyone know immediately once I have a date; there will likely be a short pre-order period before the book actually launches, but I’ve got to get the leg work done first. I’m telling you now mostly to force myself into accountability, honestly.