Category: Geek

Okay fine you twisted my arm

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy5 Comments

Money isn’t real, so let’s not bullshit: I’m totally ordering one of these fucking things next month. I didn’t realize I was going to until today. Seriously, if you’d asked me yesterday I’d have said buying first-gen Apple tech isn’t always a great idea, I’ll wait another year, and after remembering the launch event and going to apple.com earlier this afternoon I was halfway done with my preorder before I realized that I couldn’t actually preorder yet.

Basically my trade-in (for a phone, remember, that I bought last year) is going to be enough that it makes the unreasonable price for the 256gb model slightly less unreasonable. So … fuck it.

I had something else. Pardon me for a moment, while I stare at the screen.

… yeah, dammit, it’s gone. I can always post again if I remember whatever the hell I wanted to talk about, right? Not only is money not real, rules about blogging definitely aren’t real.

Shit, right! Tomorrow is dead asshole day! I am not especially looking forward to being a middle school teacher on dead asshole day. Most of my kids had no idea who Charlie Kirk was until he got his head blown off, and his entire existence is literally a joke to them right now. I still occasionally will hear kids singing the We are Charlie Kirk song quietly to themselves in the hallway; most of them, if presented with the opinions of the actual smirking shitstain behind the song, would correctly identify him as a horrible person, and then would sing the song again. I continue to believe that him getting shot in the fucking neck three seconds after making a racist joke about gun violence is the most objectively funny thing that has happened in years; the fact that it was a groyper nitwit who did it just makes it even better.

There’s a lot of people online who are promising to convert to Christianity or return to God if It Happens tomorrow; I am not one of them, but you will hear me laughing regardless of where you are in the world, and you will likely hear news stories about the middle school math teacher who got fired for taking off his pants and running through the hallways cackling and yelling blasphemies immediately afterward.

So. Y’know. You’ve got that to look forward to. Cross your fingers.

The onslaught is beginning

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, ReadingLeave a comment

I got a new R.F. Kuang book today, along with the second installment of He Who Fights with Monsters, and the middle of those three September 15 arrivals is China Miéville’s new doorstop, which is one thousand two hundred pages. And I’m probably going to order the special edition of Tad Williams’ The Dragonbone Chair, out September 29, (and 672 pages) because it gives me an excuse to read that series for the first time and the new hardbacks are stunning. However, I need to make sure the other books in the series are getting the same treatment, because God forbid they don’t match.

In other words, now that my lesson planning is finished, I’m going back to my chair, because Warlords of Wyrdwood isn’t gonna finish itself and I need to get to the Kuang book soon. There is Discourse that I’m missing, damn it!

I am never fixing anything again (clap, clap)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

Pictured, top left: the new, correctly installed Fluidmaster 400A toilet fill valve in the toilet in our hall bathroom, which is not the one that we just renovated for the second time– this is the one that we still need to renovate for a second time. Swapping out a toilet fill valve should not take any more than twenty minutes. Or, at least, that’s what I told myself as I started doing the job earlier tonight. It took, I think, about two and a half hours– because the original fill valve was fucking cemented in place, and required a literal Dremel to remove. Then I didn’t notice that a washer had fallen out of the fill tube until after we turned the water back on and I got an involuntary shower out of it, and then there was the general fuckery with tiny, molasses-like leaks that happens every single time I ever try to do something involving water.

Now, about the pronoun “I” that I used several times in that sentence– let me make it clear that my wife did at least half and quite possibly more than half of the work, because she fits into the tiny space between the toilet and the tub better than I do, and also the killing rage took over faster than it usually does. If I use the word “I” up there, I mean it– I started the job, and it was definitely I who did not notice the fucking washer, as my wife was in the basement turning the water back on and, I think, enjoying a few seconds of me screaming before turning the water back off.

“But Luther,” I can hear you saying, “doesn’t your toilet have a shutoff valve at the wall?” Yes. It does. And it is as old as the house, and it didn’t budge when I tried to move it, and the last time we tried to shut off the water with one of these valves it snapped off, and thank God it was a plumber and not me who broke it. We weren’t fucking with that valve.

But why the quick onset of the killing rage?

Because this was not the first thing I had attempted to fix today.

We have a sectional in our living room. That sectional has a chaise on it, and the back of the chaise reclines. Or, at least, it’s supposed to– it stopped returning to vertical forever ago, and because I never sit on the chaise, it was not high on my priority list. But I told myself at the beginning of the summer that I was going to take care of it, and there are precious few days of summer left– I am backish as of Wednesday, I think, so it needed to get done. So I pulled the chaise off, flipped it over, cut a big hole in the cheesecloth underneath it, and fiddled around with things. This is the problem:

I didn’t think these things could really fail; this one has. And can I replace it? I cannot. Removing it was a piece of cake; diagnosing the problem was a piece of cake; putting this one back will be a piece of cake. Finding a new one? It is to laugh. I spent far too much time this afternoon trying to find a replacement. I could not. I put Reddit on the case. Reddit could not find a replacement either, although they were able to confirm that it is called a “gas spring.” Which helped but not as much as it should have.

MEANWHILE! My teaching license has been renewed, but because God forbid I do anything right, it’s been renewed through 2036, not 2038. I assumed that since they were letting me renew my license two years early that meant they’d add the ten years to the expiration date, not from the renewal date. Is this a huge deal? No, not really. Eight years is eight years. Renewal isn’t onerous. It’s NBD. But there was also no reason I couldn’t have waited and gotten the full ten years out of it, and I’d have quietly set the paperwork aside until then if I’d known they weren’t going to give me the full ten years. Sigh.

MEANWHILE MEANWHILE! It’s that time of year again! Want to contribute anything to my classroom? I would greatly appreciate it, as classrooms are expensive. You can also contribute cash if you use CashApp; I promise any funds received that way will be used for classroom stuff. As always, anything at all is greatly appreciated, by me at least, if not by my dork-ass students.

This was fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews2 Comments

It’s rare that I pick up a Lego set specifically because I want to build it, and not necessarily because I want it on display, but I took a look at the soccer ball set that hit stores in time for the World Cup and then a conveniently timed double points weekend rolled around and my money disappeared. Because look at the inside of this thing:

That looks a lot more complicated than it was, surprisingly enough, and it was tremendously satisfying to put together. Then there’s the bit that goes in the middle:

If you press that little tan piece sitting right in front of the green, the players jump up and down and the fireworks swing from side to side. Then the whole thing can close up, and honestly, the ball looks pretty cool closed up, too:

We aren’t going to do the math on how much this cost vs. how many hours it took to put together or anything like that, we’re just going to say it was a fun way to spend an evening and an afternoon, leave it at that, and … sigh, figure out somewhere to put it.

Book review coming tomorrow; I’m waiting for the high to die down a little bit.

You should play Anthropeum

On By Luther M. SilerIn art, GeekLeave a comment

I have been broadening the number of online daily games I play lately, and I really want to recommend one of them, because I want to compare my scores with more people and talk about the game. You should be playing Anthropeum, is what I’m getting at. Here’s how it works: you are presented with ten artifacts, and the material said artifacts are made of. A lot of the time, you’ll have more than one view of the artifact, so you can get multiple angles or whatever, but sometimes it’s just the one shot.

Your job is to place the artifact on a map of the world, and nail down where it came from within a 250-year range. You get points based on how close you came on either axis, with a possible 10,000 points per item if you get both completely correct. You have three hints available; the hints will give you either the date within a thousand year range (more helpful than you might think) or a verbal description of the location, such as “Mesoamerica” or “West Africa”. You can get both if you want but that will use two hints.

I am absolutely terrible at this game and I am enjoying the hell out of it. I am allowing myself some limited research– if an artifact is described as being made of a certain kind of stone, you can sure as hell bet that I’m going to see if that stone is only found in a particular part of the globe, for example– but realistically you can find every item on the list with a reverse image search and I’m not about to do that. My best day was two days ago, where I was in the top 9% of all players worldwide. Interestingly, my highest score was about 75,000 (remember the maximum score would be 100K) but that gave me a lower percentile than the day I was in the top 9%. I had a day where I was in the bottom decile.

The two items up there that you have no clue about are a winged pendant from (roughly) pre-Colombian Colombia and a spoon, 15th or 16th century, from Nigeria. If I remember correctly (and it’s too bad that at the moment the site won’t let you go back and look at old games) I had the luckiest guess in history on the pendant and did absolutely atrociously on the spoon.

Anyway, go play and tell me how you did.

Time is meaningless

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

My schedule lately is messing with my head, and I don’t like it at all. There’s something deeply weird about it being 12:30 and being home from work for the day. Like, I’ll get home, eat some lunch, fiddle around on my phone, read a bit … and then look around and it’s only 2:30 somehow and my wife isn’t even home from work yet, and mentally my day is over, and then it just, like, starts over again somehow? I’m doing this weird thing where I’m somehow packing two days into every day, and as a result I continue to not have the vaguest idea what day of the week it is at any given time. I thought maybe it was just an artifact of my wife being out of town for a week, but it’s still going on on whatever day today is, so clearly it’s gonna stick around for a minute.

Meanwhile, the horror hell storm that we heard about for two straight days appears to have curved south, and so far my social media hasn’t filled up with videos of tornadoes, so hopefully that’s because there hasn’t actually been any destruction and not just that I haven’t heard about it. There was all kinds of chatter about losing tomorrow again because of power issues, but at least as of right now the northern part of the state appears to have been spared. We’ll see what happens. For all I know, the kids will stay home anyway. We’ll see, I guess.

Also, I just found out that this exists, and I’m experiencing Big Weird Feelings right now, so I’m gonna go.

The begging campaign begins: Dear Lego

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

I am important and influential, and my stupid little website is going to reach 200,000 people this year, and you should really, really send me a review copy of the Sagrada Família set. I keep seeing TikTok videos of people opening their review sets early, so I know you have a program. I’ll review it and put up multiple build posts. Come on. Do me a favor.

Also, finally revealing this the same week you got me to buy Minas Tirith is mean, so you should definitely send me this for free to make up for it.

On knockoffs

On By Luther M. SilerIn GeekLeave a comment

So the Task that I was nattering about for a few days there was building the Lanter Fish— no, not a “lantern fish,” we’re going to respect the Chinese misspelling here– which represents the first not-a-Lego set I’ve ever ordered. And as you can see, it looks pretty fucking cool– the jaw moves up and down, and the little light is actually a light– the Amazon listing claims you can use it as a lamp, which is hilariously wrong, but it is an actual working light.

At 1038 pieces for $35 or so, it’s probably less than half of what you’d pay if it had LEGO on all of the pieces, and there are a couple of places where you’re going to suffer for that difference, because there are definitely some quality of life issues involved in putting this thing together that Lego ironed out years if not decades ago.

Let’s start with this, the contents of Bag 2:

Perhaps you haven’t put a Lego set together in a while: the pieces come in numbered bags, and there’s usually fifty to a hundred pieces in a bag, sometimes even fewer. This set had three big bags, each of which had five or six smaller bags inside that bag:

The problem is that, while I can see some organization in terms of which pieces were in which bag, that organization has nothing to do with the order they’re put together in, so you have to open all five of those bags right away, because the first three steps might involve pieces from all five bags. That means you’re sorting through hundreds of pieces to find whatever you may happen to be looking for for any given step, which slows everything way the hell down. I am not the type to pre-organize my pieces before building, but that feels way more essential with these sets. It took me easily twenty minutes of searching for one particular piece, which I eventually found stuck inside another piece. Now, that could happen with a Lego set too, but there would be a fifth as many pieces inside the bag, so it would still have been much easier to locate.

The other thing: I’ve occasionally wondered why Lego chooses the random colors they do for the pieces you can’t see, and have speculated that it was maybe a product of whatever they had a lot of lying around or something– was there a reason this piece was red and not blue? Sometimes the answer is yes, but in putting this set together I’ve realized a couple of other reasons to vary the colors:

  1. Easily 90 percent of this set is black(*), and any piece that isn’t black is going to be grey or dark brown, which blends in with black pretty damn well. The eyes are the only red pieces in the entire set. This makes it really hard to pick out individual small pieces in a pile of parts, especially when you’re stupid enough to try to build the set on a desk with a black surface, like I did.
  2. It helps with orientation when you’re looking at the instructions– not just “Okay, the 2×6 brick needs to be facing up,” but “the 2×6 blue brick needs to be facing up,” which is a big difference.

I spent a lot more time than usual pondering the instructions on this set and making small mistakes that I had to undo later, and it just led to more respect for the fucking geniuses Lego has creating their instruction manuals over there. They do this thing where all of the new pieces in a step are in color (mostly) and everything else is greyed out, and I can see why they decided to do that– it’s a lot easier to pick out the new parts, and one of the most common mistakes you will make with a Lego set is not noticing a specific part you were supposed to add on a certain step– but the printing quality of the manual was not high in the first place, and what it often meant was that the instructions were just hard to understand. There were also a few steps where you were building things in a way that would never fly in a Lego set, and instructions where you were adding things to the bottom of stuff you already had built, which was a huge pain in the ass.

That said? The lanter fish looks pretty fucking cool, and at that price I’ll put up with some nonsense.

(*) All black, yes, but a gorgeous, pearlescent black that is really hard to capture in pictures. I love the color of this thing.