The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
God damn it, I swear I read books. I think there’s only like two or three on here new to this month.
(And, because I feel like it needs an explanation: I really want to read the John Gwynne book, but there are three sequels. I’m waiting until I finish a few more of the series books on the shelf before adding another one.)
I’m not sure why the walls look so yellow; I can assure you they are white, although we’re considering repainting because they’re ugly white.
This is what the dining room looks like now:
There is a row of bookshelves behind that row of bookshelves, plus the one against the wall that decided to commit suicide rather than be relocated. In all honesty, I’m surprised we got away with only one going ‘splode on us, given how old and cheap these shelves are.
More changes coming! Stay tuned.
We haven’t moved any furniture yet, really– the piano is being moved into the hallway tomorrow, which I am not excited about– but we got a lot of “small and movable” types of things out of the room, and prepped the dining room and the family room to have other stuff moved into them. These books? That completely cover our dining table? These are just the books that were on the shelves wrong. In other words, these are the books that were on top of the bookshelves, or on the bookshelves but in front of the books that were shelved properly. In other words, you would be completely accurate if you looked at the bookshelves in the living room and pronounced them to be completely full. Because they are.
This is why we need entirely new shelves.
Maybe a new house.
We’ll see.
I have to empty every piece of furniture and every book– and there are a couple thousand– out of my living room by Wednesday, so that we can put new carpet down.
Super exciting, in an “I want to die” sort of way.
I decided tonight that I need to have admin access to my brain.
I mean, that’s not a new thought by any means, but it struck me particularly hard tonight. There are certain things that I know about that I really don’t feel like I need to know about, and I would like to be able to identify unnecessary information that’s stuck in my skullmeats and simply cleanly excise it, and if there was a way to prevent myself from relearning that information in the future– perhaps some sort of memory mute button– that would be great too.
There exists a man who intentionally wishes to be known as Yung Gravy, and I had to retype Yung four fucking times to convince WordPress that yes, that was the word I wanted, which really only adds more pain to this process. He is, supposedly, a musician; I am aware of one of his songs and I do not like it. This is his song:
I’m not watching this video. You can’t make me.
Anyway. Mr. Gravy presumably has fans; you may be one of them. That’s fine! He can have fans. You can be one of them. I just don’t need this man in my brain, and I would like to remove him. You may have my memories of him, if you’d like. That’s fine.
It gets worse. Would you like to know why I am aware of the existence of Yung Gravy? Because it’s not because of his music. No, the rabbit hole goes deeper than that, and I don’t want any of it.
I know Yung Gravy exists because, somehow, I found out that he was dating Addison Rae’s mother.
(Do you know who Addison Rae is? If you don’t, I suggest you stop reading now. This knowledge will not improve your life.)
I do not want to know that Yung Gravy is dating Addison Rae’s mother. I don’t particularly want to know about Addison Rae, although she’s not all that offensive– she’s just pretty and kinda vacuous, and … whatever, right? But I definitely don’t want to know about Addison Rae’s mother, who is far too old to be dating anyone with “Yung” in his name. She has also managed to be the famewhore in the family despite giving birth to someone who dances and prances around in a bikini for her millions of TikTok fans. Addison Rae’s mother is odious in a large number of ways, I do not like her, I definitely do not want her or her stupid Karen haircut in my brain, and while she is exactly the type of person who would divorce her husband and latch onto a third-rate rap artist with a stupid fucking name in hopes it would get her a couple of extra clicks beyond what she’s already siphoning off from her only-four-years-younger-than-her-boyfriend daughter, I don’t need to know about any of those people. At all.
So now I’ve made you aware of all of this, unless you had the good sense to stop reading this post before now– and who would blame you?– and it doesn’t help. All I’ve done is spread the infection, I haven’t cured it. Because you, as one of my readers, are a person possessed of both intellect and rarefied taste, and you don’t need this shit either. So help me. Let’s all go back to grad school and become brain doctors and figure this shit out together. Because after I get rid of Yung Gravy, I need to tear out the Kardashians and Kanye West, and that’s going to require a bit more work.
The YouTube channel is, at least by my not-quite-lofty standards, blowing up lately, and the current series I’m doing on A Plague Tale: Requiem already has four or five videos over a hundred views. I’m not sure what’s driving it but I’m definitely happy about it, especially since all of my other social media stuff has been pretty stagnant lately. We’re back to two videos a day until I’m back at school again, so this is a good time to jump on, especially if people being eaten by rats in fourteenth-century France is your bag.
(sudden realization)
I’ve been seeing big jumps in page views at night, although today that pattern has been broken somewhat. I just now figured out why– it’s because I’m playing through the game in French, and I bet if I check in a couple of days I’ll have been getting lots of traffic from France. That’s cool for now but it’s not great in terms of people sticking around once this series is over. We’ll see, I guess.
Let’s see, what else is going on? Carpet Man is coming tomorrow to measure my living room. After that Project Empty The Living Room starts, which I’m not looking forward to, and then over the next week we have two different sets of contractors coming over for two different projects, and my brain is melty as hell right now because there’s too much going on.
I read Kara Jorgensen’s excellent The Reanimator’s Heart, which you should read and I should do a full review of. I’m starting Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Eyes of the Void tonight, which … I may talk about that tomorrow too, because it’s not the large print edition and yet somehow has the biggest type I think I’ve ever seen in any non-large-print book. We all know Tchaikovsky can write long, so it’s weird that they felt like they needed to increase his page count like this. I’ll post pictures eventually, trust me, but it’s gotta be 14-point text. I should check the first book in the series and see if it was huge type too. It’s actually distracting.
… yeah, that’s what I’ve got. What’s up in your neck of the woods? Do you even live in the woods? Nobody lives in the woods anymore.
On paper I think I had a good day. I got a bunch of stuff done, including voting and getting some episodes recorded and heading over to NewDistrict to get some paperwork done and pick up my teacher devices. The only problem is when I signed the contract I found out I wasn’t getting a pay raise by moving over. In fact, I’m getting a cut. Why? Because I forgot an elementary fact about being a teacher– which is that we don’t get paid during the summer, or rather, we don’t earn money during the summer. Which means that salary gets prorated when you jump mid-year, because the time you’re earning money is less but you still have those same number of earning-free summer pay periods to cover. I’m pissed, because I should have remembered this. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter, because the amounts we’re dealing with are manageable, but planning on a number going up and then discovering it’s going to go down is fuckery, and I don’t like fuckery.
And since I’ve started this post I’ve discovered that I don’t remember simple, complex and compound sentences nearly as well as I thought I did, meaning that I wasn’t able to really help my son with his homework properly, and now I’m just shitty about everything.
Bah.
I have spent some time actively resisting trying to write this, but fuck it, I’m pissed and if I can’t complain on my own Goddamned blog I can’t complain anywhere.
I have only very recently and very reluctantly become a Taylor Swift fan. To this day I don’t know why the hell I downloaded folklore, it was a completely random decision, but for some reason I loved it, and then when Evermore dropped a few months later I bought that too, and then I found out that she was re-releasing her old albums basically just as a giant screw-you to her previous producer, and to hell with it, that’s punk as fuck, and so now I’ve got Taylor’s Versions of Red and Fearless on my hard drive too.
Also, to make it clear, I don’t stream. I still buy music. I’m not gonna stop. Just take that as a given and roll with it.
Anyway, she announced Midnights, and fuck it– I actually preordered the Goddamn thing, and do you see my mistake yet? Are you keyed into Taylor Swift’s shenanigans enough to know where the rest of this post is going? Because three fucking hours after this album I pre-ordered became available for download, before I had even woken up to listen to it, she released a new “3 AM” version of it with seven additional tracks.
There is no way to pay the $3 difference between the cost of Midnights and 3 AM to get the extra tracks. Since I pre-ordered two months ago, I can’t get a refund on the original version and download the new one. My only option is to pay $1.29 for each individual song, which means paying $21.02 for an album that I could get for $14.99 if I hadn’t pre-ordered the album.
This is a shitty, shitty thing to do to your fans, lady. You’re a multifuckingmillionaire and you’re trying to bilk my ass out of nine bucks. And I have nine bucks! Daddy can do this. All day, every day. No problem.
But you best believe I’m stealing those seven songs anyway.
Shit.
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