Month: November 2021

In which you aren’t supposed to suck

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I am a fanboy, I admit it: I am typing this post on the most advanced iMac that was available when I bought it; my last several phones have been iPhones, my watch is an Apple Watch, there are at least two if not three iPads in the house (I’ve lost track of one, and we may have recycled it) along with at least two Apple TVs and, if I had brought my work laptop home, which I never do, there would be two MacBooks in the house as well, even though my non-work one needs replacing.

I am so stuck in Apple’s ecosystem that it would require wholesale overhauling of a number of significant aspects of my life in order to properly escape from it. And I mostly don’t want to. But, y’all … this weekend my people got in my damn nerves, and I haven’t quite escaped from Minor Inconvenience Tech Hell just yet and I’m still peeved about it.

To start (and I mean “minor inconvenience” when I say it) Apple Maps decided that it was going to choose a different route to get to my brother’s house than the one I picked. He lives in the northern suburbs of Chicago, and your options are basically “through the city” or “not through the city,” both of which take about the same amount of time because one is long but fast and the other is shorter but, well, takes you through the city, which means you’re guaranteed to encounter some bumper-to-bumper bullshit on 90/94 somewhere. I haven’t lived in Chicago for going on fifteen years, and there are still some things about living in the city (which I loved, and still do) that I miss damn near every day.

Traffic is not one of them.

Anyway, I realized too late that not only was my phone trying to direct me through the city but it was trying to send me to Lakeshore Drive for some reason, which if you know the city will cause you to raise an eyebrow and if you don’t, well, that’s wrong no matter what route you’re trying to get north with, trust me. At that point I decided that, fuck it, I was going to go rogue, only it turned out that 1) my memory of the city’s highways wasn’t as great as I thought it was and 2) even if I wasn’t heading to LSD just yet I was beyond the point of no return to stay on the Dan Ryan, which meant we got a fun little detour through Chinatown.

I mean, it cost 15-20 minutes, maybe, while I got back on the highway I wanted to be on, so again: minor inconvenience, but I didn’t want to be driving through the West Loop yesterday one way or another, and if my phone had taken me though the route I chose rather than the route it thought was a good idea, this wouldn’t have happened.

The second thing was an ongoing sync issue with Apple Music and iTunes, and if you’ve ever had to deal with that particular slice of bullshit you can probably understand the vast aggravation and high dudgeon I’ve spent most of the last two days in whenever I had a moment where fuck with my phone became a possibility; ie, any time I was not covered in flour or sleeping. I think I’ve solved that problem finally as of about 20 minutes ago, but we’ll see if it shows up again tomorrow where the only tracks I can listen to from this album are the three preorder tracks. (This happens every time I preorder an album, which I’m done doing. It’s digital files. You can’t run out. No more preordering.)

Anyway.

There’s some more Elden Ring live-streaming coming tonight, from 10:00 until 1:00 AM or until I have the sense to go the fuck to bed, whichever comes first, with a full post of my thoughts coming probably tomorrow. The short version: Don’t expect to talk to me in March. I have shit to do.

Early Thanksgiving!

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

In lieu of a View From My Hotel Window post, since it’s ludicrously dark: my family has never been a Traditions Family, and neither has my wife’s. My brother, on the other hand, very much married into a Traditions Family, and one of those traditions is fresh pasta on Thanksgiving.

‘Twas a good day.

#REVIEW: The Meaning of Names, by Karen Gettert Shoemaker

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

I’m not entirely sure that my thoughts about this book are going to rise to the level of a full review, but here we go: this book is a story about (mostly) a German immigrant family in Nebraska in 1918, at the tail end of World War I, a war that, let me remind you, was fought over absolutely nothing. It’s kind of astonishing how angry reading about World War I makes me; there is an argument to be made (in another post, mind you) that it was at least one of history’s most pointless wars, and literally not a single soul who died or was injured in that war made that sacrifice for anything at all. Everyone just got involved because they were supposed to, and then suddenly we have thousands of men dying over inches in fields where the mud is so deep the horses are drowning in it. Over nothing.

Anyway.

I said a German immigrant family, mind you, and if you’re suspecting that German speakers might have faced some bigotry in Nebraska during a time when America was at war with Germany, you’d be suspecting correctly. So this book is already about a war that makes me irrationally angry to read about, then drop a load of bigotry on top of that.

And, uh, do you happen to remember what else happened in 1918? Oh, right, a global pandemic caused by an extremely contagious respiratory disease! One that people blamed on … immigrants! Or, at least, they blamed on immigrants when they weren’t pretending the whole thing was a hoax! There’s even a bit where the local doctor tells someone to wear a mask when he’s in public and he scoffs at it.

(The book was written in 2014, by the way, so this parallel was unintentional.)

Now, here’s the thing: the book is good! It’s well-written, and the plot and the characters and all that are well done. But Christ this book was hard to read, and … like, can I get away with saying that the book wasn’t annoying but reading it annoyed me anyway? And in a way that I absolutely don’t blame on the book or the author. Again, this is a good book and you should read it. Just … ignore the fact that I’m probably never picking it up again.

I’m going to be out of town for the next couple of days, as we’re going to the northern Chicago suburbs to have early Thanksgiving dinner with my brother, sister-in-law and my new nephew. There will be the standard view-from-my-hotel post tomorrow, but expect relative quiet. In the meantime, I’ll be up way too late tonight streaming Elden Ring from 10:00 to 1:00 am EST, so you should absolutely check that out.

Elden Ring TOMORROW

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

Am I excited about this? HELL YES I am excited about this.

I got into the Elden Ring network test beta, naturally on a weekend where I’m going to be out of town Saturday to Sunday, but I’m going to be live-streaming all three hours tomorrow night (10:00 pm – 1:00 am EST) and there’s a slight (read: nonexistent) chance that I’ll even be up hella early in the morning streaming as well. The test has five three-hour chunks over the weekend and I plan to stream for two of them even without the crack of dawn thing, so I’ll get at least six hours in of checking the game out and every last second of it will be online for the Internet’s perusal.

Unfortunately, I got home from work tonight and went straight to parent/teacher conferences for my son and then came home and had to grade, so this is the limit of my energy for the day. But best believe I’m going to spend all day waiting for 10:00 to roll around tomorrow. I’ll take a nap when I get home if I have to.

Taking the night off

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

Go curl up with a book.

See, here’s your problem

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

This happened.

Had a kid call me over to her seat today because she didn’t understand how to solve a problem on her assignment. I glanced at it, felt part of my soul die, and did my best to help her.

“Okay. The first problem here is that this is a true or false problem. Your answer is 3. Do you see why that’s wrong?”

I am fairly certain I have more white hair than I did when I left for work this morning, and I blame my students.

On suburban splendor

On By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I just mowed our front lawn, for what I suspect will be the last time this year (note for the record, that’s not our house up there) and after finishing the job I texted my wife to come outside and look at it.

“We have lived in this house for ten years,” I said, “and this is the best the lawn has ever looked. Right now at this exact second.”

Y’all know this about me if you’ve been around here for a minute; I hate yard work. I hate it. When we bought this house there was a foot of snow on the lawn and on the roof and had we looked at it in the summer when I’d have had a moment to realize what I was getting us into I would have argued against buying the place. The couple that owned the house before us were elderly and retired and they clearly had channeled all of their leisure time into the landscaping and the lawn, much like one of our neighbors still does (our other neighbors keep their front lawn putting-green short, which is a whole different, slightly weird vibe) and we are clearly the No Fucks to Give house in the neighborhood.

Anyway, this year– and not for the first time!– we shelled out some money for a lawn company to handle things like fertilization and reseeding for us. We have done this in the past with another company to no real result, and figured it was worth one more shot with another company this year, and … man. I gotta admit it, as much as I hate this shit it’s nice to look at a lawn after it’s been mowed and you can see the lines and everything is nice and clean and even. And there aren’t any super-thin patches and that damn fairy ring is gone and no weeds. Hell, there weren’t even any leaves, since raking happened this weekend(*) and I mowed up everything that fell since then.

Anyway, if you’re local, and you don’t have the patience to deal with your lawn’s bullshit yourself, you could do a lot worse than hiring Lawn Doctor.

(*) by which I mean my wife raked the front lawn. Isn’t passive voice awesome? I bet you thought I had something to do with it.

Apple Cider Cookies!

On By Luther M. SilerIn CookingLeave a comment

Okay, so the icing is … evocative, and you can tell exactly which cookies were iced by my wife, she of I Might Not Want A Lot of Icing, and which ones were re-iced by me, of Fuck Diabetes More Icing, but the house smells Goddamned delicious and I have actually managed to successfully bake something.

Credit to @bdylanhollis over at TikTok, who found the recipe (he cooks vintage foods, and his account is fantastic,) baked better-looking cookies than mine and is also more entertaining.

The recipe: in a large bowl, combine 3/4 cup of softened butter, 1 cup of brown sugar, 1/2 cup of regular sugar, and mix. Add an egg. Mix again.

In a second bowl, combine 2 cups of flour, a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of baking soda, and 1/2 teaspoons each of nutmeg, allspice, ginger, and cardamom, along with 2 teaspoons of cinnamon. Mix.

In yet another bowl, chop the hell out of an apple (I used a Fuji, and probably could have used one and a half or two of them, since they were small) and add a quarter cup of apple cider. Note that in the video he appears to be using way more than that; I assume that’s just for filming purposes.

Add the bowl with the flour to the first bowl, mix, then pour in the apples and mix more. Mix forever. The dough will be super sticky, which is fun.

Chill. He doesn’t say how long; I gave it 25 minutes and called it good. Get ’em onto a baking sheet (this was enough for 26 cookies using one of those dough-baller-thingies) or two and bake at 350 for “at least” seventeen minutes; I gave them 18 1/2 and they were still super soft out of the oven but I don’t think they were underbaked. They’re just soft cookies.

For the icing, mix 3 tablespoons of melted butter, a third of a cup of cider, and powdered sugar. Lots of powdered sugar. Just dump a whole bag in there. It’ll be fine. (Directions are “until it’s thick.” This will produce way more icing than you need and probably not as much as you want.)

Ice and eat. Then lick the icing bowl. My God.