Month: November 2025

On Dungeon Crawler Carl

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

Wow, that’s bigger than I thought it was going to be.

Oh well. Scrolling’s free.

I finished the seventh and most recent book in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series last night, staying up too late to do it. The eighth book comes out in June; I pre-ordered it the literal first day it became available to do so. Dinniman has an unrelated book, Operation Bounce House, coming out in February, and I’ve preordered that as well. The series is currently expected to be ten books, and apparently might be eleven.

I don’t think I’ve reviewed any of the books as I’ve read them, and I don’t really intend for this to be a review yet either, as a multi-book review really ought to be for the whole series and even as fast as Dinniman seems to write, we’re at least two or three years away from that. I will say this, though: I started this series mostly out of FOMO, something that y’all know good and well catches me on books all the time. I don’t like not reading good books, even if their premise– aliens invade Earth and a guy and his cat get thrown into an intergalactic competition that somehow mimics the genre tropes of role-playing video games– is completely ridiculous. “LitRPG” is its own entire genre; having read and enjoyed eight books in it, other than reading more of Dinniman’s work in the future I have no plans at all to dip my toe into any other examples of it.

I’ve been reading about a book a month in this series since picking up Dungeon Crawler Carl in May. The first one was at least a little bit against my will; I wasn’t expecting to like what I was reading all that much, but again, FOMO.

I plan to restart the series in December so that I can have read it twice by the time A Parade of Horribles comes out. My wife picked up the first book on a whim a couple of months ago and is currently reading book five, and she’s read them back to back to back to back to back. Which means the same as “back to back” but sounds like more of a feat. This is not a thing she does, guys.

These books have no fucking right to be this good. They’re too ridiculous and too raunchy to be as good as they are. And yet somehow this series is the best new thing I’ve encountered in a long time, and having read four thousand pages of this series this year I am about to start over and do it again.

Plus Bounce House and the first book of another series of his called Kaiju Battlefield Surgeon, because right now Dinniman is tied with BrandoSando for the author I’ve read the most books from in 2025, and I can’t let Sanderson win that contest.

Just do it. Trust me. Put aside your reservations and pick up the first book. The whole series is on Kindle Unlimited if you happen to have Amazon Prime, so you don’t even have to pay for it. Get them from the library. I know, I know, this feels like it has to be dumb as hell. Go give them a shot anyway.

Uncle

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

Fifteen teachers out in the building is already a rough goddamned day.

Making the worst DCS call of my entire life is already a rough goddamned day.

Both happening on the same day damn near broke me.

I’ll be honest

On By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

I could probably come up with a decent post if I tried, but all I want to do tonight is read Book 7 of Dungeon Crawler Carl.

I really ought to write a post about those damn books.

I can’t tell this story

On By Luther M. SilerIn Teaching2 Comments

I got a new student today, or rather I got her yesterday but I met her today, since I managed to drag my ass back to work this morning. Her name was unique but not in a way that seemed hard to pronounce; demographic data said she was white, but “white” can still cover a whole hell of a lot of ethnicities, right? I was prepared for her to be Eastern European or any of a variety of different things, but I still felt like I wasn’t going to immediately pronounce her name wrong unless there was something genuinely weird about it.

You may or may not be aware that “Micheal” is starting to be a way that people who are dumb and bad have chosen to spell their sons’ names. If you’ve been teaching in the last ten years or so, you’ve probably encountered at least one Micheal in there somewhere, and if you’re like me, you’ve immediately resolved to never contact those parents, ever, under any circumstances.

Gentle reader, the actual pronunciation of this child’s name is so, so much worse than simply reversing the admittedly-not-entirely-intuitive vowel placement in “Michael.” It’s worse than the forty thousand different spellings of “Jasmine” I’ve encountered over the years. Now, I really can’t tell you her actual name, because it’s unique enough that if she ever Googles herself she’ll find this post. But imagine a child being named, oh, I dunno, “Sahar,” and you think oh, that’s a neat name, I’ve never met a Sahar before, and you figure it’s pronounced like the first two syllables in “Sahara,” right? Might be wrong, but surely it’s not that far off. Like maybe you think it’s Suh-harrrr and it’s Sa-hair. Wrong, but not offensively so.

And then she tells you her name is pronounced “Sarah,” and you have to immediately freeze your face and not let the words No, it fucking isn’t, you poor thing out of your mouth.

I want my Oscar, Goddammit.

This again

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I took a shower a few hours ago, my first since Saturday, and since my son got sick at school and had to come home early, I left the house for the first time since Friday. I have no symptoms other than “headache and sleepy,” but God, the sleepy part has been hitting like a truck. I joked a few days ago on some social media site or another– hell, it may have been here(*)– that I had a student with mono and was pretty sure I hadn’t gotten it from him, but I can’t think of anything else other than changing brain meds whose main symptom is can’t stay awake. And the brain meds have not changed.

I’m going to work tomorrow. I have to go to work tomorrow, if only because missing three days in a row will cause the children to burn my room down, and I can’t have that. But I’m going to have to find a way to make it a low teaching day, because I’m still brain-dead and somehow I feel like ten hours more sleep between now and then isn’t going to fix that.

(Pause for enormous, jaw-cracking yawn)

Yeah. Taking my clean self back to bed now. Blech.

(*) Yup.

Monday no fun day

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

Woke up this morning with a screaming headache, stayed in bed all day, not sure why I’m awake now. How are you?

#REVIEW: A House of Dynamite (2025)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

Two movies? In two days? Madness!

You may recall that last year I read a book called Nuclear War: A Scenario. I called it the scariest book I had ever read, and while I absolutely cannot say that I enjoyed it, it ended up at a pretty high position on my Best Books of the Year list at the end of the year.

Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite is, technically, not a film adaptation of Nuclear War: A Scenario, or at least, if it is, it never claims it. That said, it may as well be: a single nuclear missile is launched from an unknown source (in NWAS, it’s immediately attributed to North Korea) toward what is eventually determined to be Chicago. The movie tells the story of the seventeen minutes between the detection of the launch and the impact of the missile three times from the perspective of three different groups of characters in the American government, all ending as the president makes his decision about what the US’s plan of retaliation will be. That decision is described by one character as “surrender or suicide,” and it’s not clear that there is really a whole lot of daylight between those two scenarios.

You might think that watching the same twenty minutes three times (the film’s runtime is just under two hours, so there’s not exactly a clock ticking in the corner for the entire movie) might be repetitive enough to drain some of the tension out of the film. For me, at least, it absolutely wasn’t, and the fact that you hear some of the same conversations three times over the course of the movie didn’t cut the drama at all. This might be partially attributable to my age– I think us ’80s kids are going to get hit harder by this movie than the generations before or after us, as the threat of dying by nuclear annihilation was something that was hanging over our heads for our entire childhood and we’ve internalized that very differently than people who didn’t go through that. But I had to go outside and mow the lawn after watching this movie just to burn off excess nervous energy, and I think it’s gonna have me fucked up for the rest of the day if not for longer than that.

I don’t have a ton to say about the technical aspects of the movie. The music is very effective, quietly echoing Jaws in the worst imaginable way and again plucking at the strings of the ’80s kids. The acting is as good as it needs to be with no really standout performances; the only actor in the film I was previously familiar with was Idris Elba, who plays the President as someone who never really thought he’d have to make the decisions he is faced with and allows just a trace of “Why me?” to come through his performance. Angel Reese has a cameo; I guess I’ve heard of her, but the movie’s not going to live or die on her playing herself for a couple of minutes.

Much like Nuclear War: A Scenario, I can’t really recommend this movie so much as say it’s very effective at what it wants to do and it’s up to you whether you want that in your brain or not. I wouldn’t spend a lot of time reading reviews; they’re very mixed, and I’m guessing that the film’s ending is primarily responsible for that. I’m not spoiling anything; for me, it ended in the best way it could, but clearly a whole lot of other people disagreed.

I think I’ll go mow the lawn again.

(ALSO: If you’re a Movie Person, please follow me on Letterboxd. I need people over there.)

#REVIEW: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies, ReviewsLeave a comment

In case it hasn’t been clear, or, like a normal person, you aren’t obsessed with my media consumption, I decided recently that I was tired of complaining about how I don’t watch movies any more, and instead I was going to watch more movies. And because nothing in my life can’t be mined for blog content, I might as well review them too. I missed last week, but this weekend’s movie (or today’s, at least; maybe I’ll make up for last week tomorrow) was The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, written and directed by the Coens.

I only know this movie exists because of TikTok, which has served up numerous snippets of Tim Blake Nelson’s titular Buster Scruggs, a white-garbed, polysyllabic desperado with a penchant for murderous improvisation and bursting into song at the slightest provocation. What I didn’t realize was that this movie is actually six unrelated vignettes, all set in the Old West, with the framing device of a book of short stories called The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

Sadly, the book itself is fictional; each vignette begins and ends with a slow pan into the first or last page of the story, and what text that’s there aroused my attention and would surely have acquired my money had the book actually existed to be bought.

The stories themselves range from the comic and musical (Scruggs) to what really feels like supernatural horror (The Mortal Remains) to a couple that are more firmly reality-based and tend toward the dark and depressing. The second, Near Algodones, is the only near-miss of the bunch; James Franco’s bank robber character is not terribly interesting, and while the visual of a deranged bank teller protecting himself from gunshots with armor made from cast-iron pans is hilarious, the story is slight enough that I couldn’t remember it just now and had to look for a list of the vignettes to get myself to six.

As it turned out, I had already unknowingly seen Scruggs nearly in its entirety on TikTok, and I was a little worried after Algodones, but the last four vignettes are uniformly fascinating and well worth the cost of a subscription to Netflix and two hours out of my Saturday. If you like Westerns or the Coens’ previous output, it’s well worth your time.