Month: June 2022

Basement update

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’m not showing you pictures of the actual basement until it’s done, but this is what we did to our garage today:

If, uh, you happen to spot a wedding present in there, I promise it’s just the box. Really. Honest. My car is also completely full of cardboard– any cardboard still in this picture is going to get dropped off on Tuesday– because my son is attending something called Cardboard Camp for the next week, unless it gets cancelled because the roads between here and Hogwarts have melted. The one really bad bit of decision making here is that since we’ve filled the garage with stuff we’re going to get rid of in the garage sale we can’t put our cars in there, and as a result my car is going to have to be outside during the impending heat wave, which means if the boy’s camps aren’t cancelled for those two days transporting him there and back is gonna be super fun. I’m psyched about it. Honest.

Also, my knees hate me right now, and there’s still more work to be done downstairs. My wife and son hit the pool for the first time since we put it up after we were done working, but I didn’t because I didn’t trust myself on the ladder. Two days of too much up-and-down on stairs have got me hobbling more than I’m comfortable with at the moment, so I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I’m gonna land on my ass. I think I’ll be living there for most of the next few days, though.

No basement talk tomorrow; there are books to be reviewed!

In which I am old and fat and out of shape

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

Spent a few hours cleaning out the basement again, and I’m ready to collapse into a puddle and die. In theory, some of the things that will be replacing the years of cruft we’re tearing out of the basement will help with that, and there’s probably going to be a garage sale next weekend, but … yeah, I’m unhealthy. To a degree that’s frankly kinda scary. My stairs aren’t the friendliest either, mind you– there ain’t a damn thing on ’em cushioning any of the shock to my knees when I go up or down– but today shouldn’t have been as hard as it was.

There will be more tomorrow, including a great amassing of cardboard for a camp the boy is going to next week. At least in theory. My understanding is that it is supposed to be about 700 degrees on Tuesday and Wednesday, so we may have some heat cancellations in our future, which apparently has to be a thing now.

Anyway, I’ll post some pictures of the basement when we’re done with it. And probably of the garage sale too, next weekend. We’ve been here 11 years and haven’t ever done one, so there ought to be a LOT of stuff to get rid of. And very possibly a big-ass dumpster in my driveway the week after. I may have said all of this yesterday; my apologies if I’m repeating myself. I’m fucking tired. 🙂

Eeew

On By Luther M. SilerIn Uncategorized2 Comments

I spent my Friday throwing things around in my basement and, related to that, attempting to find a decent price on a dumpster. We have so much shit that needs to be thrown away.

This means that I am sweaty and gross and kinda pissed off, but at least I got some stuff accomplished today.

On the news

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Politics5 Comments

I don’t know, as I’m typing this, whether this will end up being a thousand-word post or two paragraphs, because I really don’t know how much I want to talk about this and I won’t know until I start typing. So here we go: I do not intend to watch a single second of the hearings about the January 6th insurrection tonight, nor do I plan to watch them in the future, and in fact I’m not even sure how many days of hearings are currently scheduled. There is nothing– nothing— that these hearings can actually teach me about what happened that day; as near as I can tell all the committee has managed to do is confirm stuff that was perfectly fucking obvious from the day it happened. Of course the shitstain knew what was happening. Of course the highest echelons of the Republican Party were involved in planning it. The closest thing to a surprising detail I’ve heard in the last six months was that Pence’s staff knew that he was in danger, and Pence is such an indescribable coward that he has continued to cling to this wretched creature anyway.

Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I spend all day every day angry and I’m not going to deliberately add to it. I’m just not going to do it.

What I will do, of course, is keep an eye on fucking Twitter, which will no doubt keep me appraised of everything happening in the most anger-inducing manner possible. Or maybe I’ll just turn everything off and shoot Nazis all night again. I am a hundred percent not alone in this, but I would love to find a way to balance knowing enough about what is going on in the world to be able to consider myself an informed citizen with shutting off the absolute fucking fire-hose torrent of horror and evil the world has become. I can feel myself becoming Col. Kurtz over here, y’all, and no one needs that. Least of all me.

I’m going to shoot Nazis to bleed off some stress and then I’m going to watch the first episode of Ms. Marvel, and hopefully I’ll be able to do that without thinking about how fucking awful most of the people who share my hobbies are. We’ll see.

It’s Wednesday and I’ve got nothing

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

I’ve been sitting here staring at the screen for twenty minutes and this is the first sentence I’ve managed to write, so clearly I don’t have a strong agenda for today’s post. In other news, I have watched this TikTok video four thousand times today and you need to know about it, so at least I’ve done a good deed today.

@sylar2.5

#parodysong

♬ original sound – Sylar

On Nazis and pregnancies, but not at the same time

On By Luther M. SilerIn StoriesLeave a comment

I’ve been playing Sniper Elite 5 on the PlayStation 5 lately, because setting the difficulty to something obscenely low and shooting Nazis in the face from a hundred yards away has been about where my brain has been at lately. I like this series, but not as anything I take seriously; I don’t want to be challenged in Sniper Elite 5. I want to be an invincible force of death. I want the Nazis to tell their children that I’ll find them if they’re not quiet and well-behaved, and then I want those kids to tell me where their parents are, because their parents are Nazis and that means I can shoot them in the face.

Also, it’s the anniversary of D-Day. Also also, any time the anniversary of D-Day rolls around, I start thinking about my grandfather, who wasn’t actually at D-Day but joined the Allied assault in France a bit later, eventually being wounded in the Battle of Nancy, being handed a Purple Heart, and rotated back Stateside with a piece of a mortar shell in his ankle that, presumably, is still in his coffin with him, since the surgeons never bothered to remove it.

And today something hit me: I have an aunt named Nancy. And I tried to think about the timeline, and ended up calling another one of my aunts, the one I can bother relatively early in the morning with nonsense like this, and asked her about the timeline between Grandpa getting home and Nancy being born and named. Had my grandfather named my aunt after the battle in which he’d been wounded? It seemed possible, at least; I had to know.

No, as it turns out. Grandma was pregnant with Nancy when Grandpa shipped out, and she was born while he was overseas and named him herself. Tantalizingly, though, apparently my grandmother named Nancy herself and wrote Grandpa and told him the name, and my aunt tells me that his response was that she should “take it (the name, not my aunt) out and bury it, because it stinks.”

It is perhaps indicative of the type of woman my grandmother was– this is the one the name Siler comes from, by the way– that she ignored his, uh, suggestion, and her second daughter kept the name that she gave her. It’s also possibly an indication that Grandpa knew when he wrote the letter where he was heading and where he was likely to see combat, but I’d have to know a lot more about timelines– they’re both gone, so who knows where those letters might be– before I could make a supposition like that.

This led, somehow, to a conversation about the timing of the conception of various and sundry of my relatives; turns out one of my cousins is the product of a “lunch quickie,” and that my grandparents were in the house when another of my cousins from her was conceived. I changed the subject as soon as the phrase “lunch quickie” came up, by the way.

(My birthday is July 5; my mom’s was October 3. I have always assumed I was a birthday present; Dad, if that was not the case, I don’t need further details.)

On Season 3 of THE BOYS

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, TelevisionLeave a comment

This will be the third time I have written about Amazon Prime’s series The Boys, based on the Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson comic book of the same name, in this space. The first piece I wrote about it started with a content warning for “everything,” and mainly talked about the fact that I thought the show was problematic as hell, leaning way too much into sexism and rape and fridging female characters than anything I could be comfortable with recommending, but … well … if you could get past that awfulness, there was a pretty good show in there, somehow?

Then Season 2 rolled around, and they’d shed most of Ennis’ bullshit from the first season, in general treating their female characters a lot better, not relying on rape as a driver of the plot at all, and still keeping the insanely hyperviolent and raunchy tone of the first season, which moved the show from “Eh, if you were curious already, check it out, but don’t pay for Amazon Prime for this” to “Well, don’t pay for Amazon Prime just for this, but if you already have it, you probably ought to watch an episode or two and see what you think.”

We are, as of right now, three episodes into Season 3; my understanding is that new episodes are going to drop on Friday, although I’m not 100% sure what the actual schedule is– in other words, I’m not sure if they gave us three episodes to start and there will be 3 more this Friday, or if it’ll be on a more traditional one-episode-a-week schedule, or what, but we’re three episodes in. The season isn’t finished.

But based on those three episodes, and continuing to keep in mind that this show is not for everyone, and that I really can’t emphasize enough how much bodies literally exploding into chunky red sauce has been a part of this season, and there was a sequence in the first episode that very nearly had me hiding behind the couch …

I know Amazon Prime is $129 a year now, but … yeah, you need to be watching The Boys, if your constitution can handle it. If you know you can’t, go in peace and ignore this. But if you can?

This show has some of the best acting I have ever seen on a TV screen. Antony Starr as the Homelander is absolutely fucking terrifying in a way that I have never seen in a television character before. Like, my heart rate shoots up whenever he’s on screen. I want him to play the Joker so badly I can taste it. Karl Urban is amazing. Giancarlo Esposito is amazing. Jack Quaid is amazing. Erin Moriarty and Chance Crawford and Jessie Usher and oh my God Colby Minifie are amazing. Everyone with a role on this show is doing the job of their lives.

(Discovers that Mesmer, from last season, was Haley Joel fucking Osment, and has to take a moment.)

I really cannot express enough how much you need to see the clinic that Antony Starr is putting on here, though, managing to marry being an angry, unstable god with somebody who was very clearly so broken as a child that you almost feel sorry for him. Until, of course, you realize he’s fantasizing about killing every living person in New York City in the same disconnected, unconcerned way you might think for half a second before stepping on a bug. But you can see the scared little kid in him, and it’s just so good. And the writers, who are continuing to do adaptations The Right Way, have made it so clear that this show doesn’t even vaguely understand the concept of Plot Armor that there is literally not a single second where this man is on screen where you’re not worried about him doing something terrible at any moment. It’s been years since I had to take time to calm down after watching a TV show, and we’re only three episodes into this season and they’ve done it to me three times.

So, yeah. There’s still plenty of time for shit to go wrong, but at this point, and without relinquishing any of the previous warnings attached to previous seasons, this show is moving to You Need To Be Watching This. I’ll update again once the season is over.

In which this isn’t going well

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Trigger warning: I’m about to complain about having too much time off. Adjust your expectations accordingly and if your initial reaction is “Wow, fuck you, dude,” I would encourage you to roll with that feeling and just bail on the post right now.

Because my God, y’all, it’s just amazing how terrible I am at relaxing. And I actually got some stuff done in the last couple of days! The lawn’s been mowed, and we got the pool set up today, and so far I have been out of school for a week and I have already started to slide into nocturnal behavior (I was up until 2:00 in the morning last night– granted, I was in bed and finishing a book, but still) and I’m not sure but I assume the last time I managed a shower before noon was last Friday. We’ve got another week and then the boy’s summer camps start, so I have to be at least nominally human by 11:30 or so to get him fed and to camp on time, but … damn, it’s just amazing how fast I transitioned into a ball of greasy, overfed sludge.

I gotta start getting up at Going to Work time starting tomorrow. Up and out of bed by, say, no later than 8:00, have a cup of coffee, and the second that cup of coffee is done it’s get in the shower time. Like it’s literally 7:03 PM right now, I’ve been sweaty as hell for hours, because it was crazy humid outside while we were setting up the pool, and at this point I may as well make it two hours to bedtime before I shower. I have this thing where I don’t feel like the day has really started until I’m clean and dressed and that means that the way my brain works today effectively didn’t happen.

Also I had Arby’s for lunch and they have a burger now. Go ahead and have one if you’re curious but I doubt you’ll feel the need to have another. Just don’t do it right before having to go outside and sweat for an hour; it’s not gonna work out well for you.

Gonna go shoot Nazis now, g’night.