Category: idiocy

An update on my snobbery journey

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy9 Comments

I’ve talked about this a couple of times— hell, I’ve been blogging on this site since 2013, I’ve talked about everything a couple of times— but I very badly want for there to be something that I am a snob about. Specifically, something food or drink related. The problem is, most of the snobbish foods and drinks are things I don’t actually like. I don’t drink alcohol, which means I can’t be a wine snob(*) or a whiskey snob. I don’t smoke, which rules out cigars. And, man, I have tried to be a snob about coffee. I bought a burr grinder and a French press and everything. My palate, frustratingly, is shit. I cannot tell the difference between fresh-ground beans and preground; I was prepared to let the French press take over my entire personality and I stopped using it after a week or two. It tasted the exact same except with more steps, and the process of making the coffee didn’t feel special enough for the extra steps to be anything other than a waste of time. I’ve tried fancier coffees to no avail. I drink my coffee black and that’s pretty much all I’ve got. I understand what people mean when they say Starbucks tastes burned, but I don’t go to Starbucks anyway so that little rebellion isn’t worth much. I am sad to report it, but I will never be a coffee snob. I can’t even properly look down my nose at people who don’t drink it black. Hazelnut coffee creamer is delicious.

A few weeks ago it occurred to me that I was an adult with a job, and as such I could purchase an electric kettle if I so desired. I initially bought it thinking it might make the French press easier, but I quickly realized that it also meant I could finally start drinking hot tea.

I should back up a bit. I didn’t start drinking coffee until I was around 40, when I decided I was going to get over my weird lifetime paranoia about pouring hot liquids into my mouth and forced myself to drink coffee until I liked it. Despite having been a fan of iced tea for literally my entire life, my newfound affection for coffee never generalized to tea. Why? I have no damn clue. It genuinely didn’t occur to me that I could start drinking hot tea until after I bought the electric kettle.

And …

guys.

Do you know what a tea sachet is? They’re little pyramid-shaped bags of tea. They look like this:

They generally contain a higher grade of tea than teabags do; having looked into it, my impression is that teabags are full of the tea equivalent of seeds and stems and that sachets contain, y’know, bits of actual leaves in them. They’re a bit more expensive but not tremendously so, and they steep exactly the same way you might steep a teabag. I’m pretty sure the word is pronounced sashay, but I’ve been calling them satchets because while I want to be snobbish that doesn’t mean I’m about to lower myself to pronouncing French correctly.

Anyway, I can actually taste the difference between tea brewed from a sachet and tea brewed from regular teabags. I can’t do a perfectly controlled experiment, but I have some Earl Grey teabags and some Earl Grey sachets and the sachets are definitely stronger and more flavorful than the teabags are.(**) And yes, every single time I make myself Earl Grey tea, I hear this in my head:

Anyway. This is a long post just to say that once I run through the supply of teabags I’ve purchased (Bonus fact: “sachet” isn’t a euphemism for sexual assault! Also good.) I plan to stop buying teabags altogether. I’m waiting to run out of something before I move on to, to continue the Star Trek references, the final frontier, and start experimenting with actual loose tea.

That’ll really make me fancy.

(*) One of the least fun nights of my entire life was the night my friends dragged me to a wine bar in Wrigleyville. I’m completely used to being the sober guy at the bar. Being surrounded by people daintily sniffing and swishing glasses of wine nearly ended me, especially since I’d been forced to dress up for the occasion. I damn near left and went to a movie by myself.

(**) I am currently drinking some of this, which tastes good and smells absolutely divine. Also, and randomly, I’ve discovered I don’t like chai, or at least the kind of chai I bought, which contains black pepper, a spice that should never be in a drink.

I need everyone to understand this

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

It is snowing again.

I do not think that losing school again tomorrow is likely, but if it does happen, I will lose my shit.

I will then go hunting, and rob many other people of their shit.

Which I will then also lose.

I require some normalcy, and I require it right now.

(Wow. Do not use DuckDuckGo.com to search for “fuck snow” if you have the explicit image filter turned off. Jesus.)

Anyway.

Today was, honestly, a pretty decent day– the kids were a little wild after a surprise week off, but not mean wild, just talky and silly– and there’s a new Iron Man #1 out (I didn’t make it to the comic shop yesterday), and I got three books delivered that I’ve been looking forward to, and there’s a new demo out for Nioh 3. So I’ve got a whole lot of media consumin’ heading my way.

Anyway. Everybody cross your fingers and, against all sense, hope for no snow tonight, so that we can keep the Western Hemisphere.

In which I choose violence

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Or “no one is paying attention today, I can say anything I want.” Choose your own blog title!

There’s been a debate raging– well, there’s been a lot of people alternately talking past and yelling at one another– on social media in general and TikTok in particular over the last week or so, and while I generally try to avoid this topic as much as I possibly can, it’s Christmas Day and no one is looking at the internet so if I’m ever going to say something controversial this is the best day to say it.

The debate: audiobooks. The problem: everyone is wrong.

The following are all true. You are welcome to disagree with me but you’re wrong:

  • Listening to an audiobook is not the same thing as reading. You cannot read while you’re driving a car. You cannot read while you’re taking a shower. You cannot read if you cannot read— if I’m reading a book to a toddler, that toddler isn’t reading. You cannot read in the dark. You cannot arbitrarily decide to “read” at one and a half or two times your normal speed. You don’t need electronics or speakers or headphones to read. And reading is a relationship between you and an author, with no third intermediary in between to do a really good job or screw things up.
  • This is not the same thing as discussing whether listening to an audiobook “counts” toward some sort of yearly or monthly reading goal. I don’t give one single merry shit what you decide to count toward your reading goal. I’m going to top out around 180-185 books this year. There are a lot of people who might tell me to my face that that’s impossible. Count whatever you want. I do not care.(*) We aren’t getting prizes for this!
  • Use whatever verbs you want to describe your reading; I also don’t care about that. Tell me you “read” an audiobook when we both know you “listened” to it. It’s whatever. I do not have the mental energy necessary to police language choices on this and it gets awkward in practice anyway. (Similarly, one might say “we read The Cat in the Hat” when discussing a book read to a preliterate toddler. It’s the same phenomenon.)
  • I also don’t care about your reasons for preferring audio to text, whether in general or for any given book. Maybe you just prefer it. Maybe you’re dyslexic. Maybe you don’t have any eyes! I’m not going to ask why you prefer audio and I don’t care. You do you.
  • There is also a weird side argument going on about how it’s possible to read over X number of books a year(**) and still remember everything, which seems like a weird criterion that gets applied to readers and no one else. If you pick a random book off of my shelves and ask me about it, there’s a very good chance that I won’t be able to tell you a whole lot, because depending on the book, I might have read that six years and a thousand books ago, and I also feel like my recall in general is not as good as other people I’ve met who like to read. But let’s apply this logic to, say, sports fans. If I pick one random sports ball game from five years ago that I know you watched and ask you to tell me about it, would you be able to even tell me who won? I mean, you might, especially in, say, college football, where there’s a limited number of games per year, but will you remember the score? Individual plays to discuss? And don’t tell me if I ask you about some random game 3 in a baseball series from 2019 that you’re going to remember anything about it. You just won’t.(***)
  • If it makes you angry that I don’t think listening to an audiobook is reading … why? Why the hell do you care what I think? Go do your thing; it’s okay! I’m not trying to turn you away from your audiobooks! I’m not saying you shouldn’t listen to audiobooks! I’m not saying they don’t count, because I don’t care what counts! Audiobooks are lots of things. They just aren’t reading, and if you disagree with me on that, it’s okay. I mean, you’re wrong, but it’s okay! It’s a fine thing to be wrong about. It really seems like, by and large, audiobook people are hugely defensive about their hobby, which has never made any sense to me. You have no reason to care what anyone else thinks about this!

I’ve had a hundred books as my “reading goal” for several years running and I don’t plan on changing that next year. It’s just not that damn important to me, and unless you’re pursuing reading as some sort of self-improvement practice, it probably shouldn’t be all that important to you, either. But if you’re trying to read a dozen books this year because you don’t read much and you want to read more, you’re genuinely doing something different from what I’m doing with a “reading goal,” which is mostly just indulging my mania for categorizing and keeping track of everything. There was no “Yay, I did it!” moment when I hit that 101st book. I shot for 200 one year to see if I could do it and I did, and I think that’s as excited as I ever plan on getting for a “reading goal” and I don’t plan to repeat the experiment.

Anyway, Merry Christmas, go yell at me in the comments.

(*) I did encounter one person who claimed she read over fourteen hundred books in 2025, and while my response is unlikely to be “oh, no you didn’t,” I am rather intensely curious about how, precisely, she arrived at that number. Again, I’m fully aware that most people think my 180ish is impossible. I feel like if I adjusted my standards for what “counts” or made a deliberate shift toward shorter books, I could significantly increase that amount. For example, if I counted individual issues of comic books as “books”, which I don’t, that’s probably about another 250-300 books a year without making any changes in my reading. Now, when I do that and it only brings me to a third of this person’s total … again, I’m not gonna argue, because they can say whatever they want, but I’m curious about how they arrived at that number. Maybe they do slush reading for a children’s book company or something. I dunno.

(**) This, I think, is very similar to the dynamics of driving, where anyone driving faster than you are at that particular moment is a maniac. I know I can read X number of books per year, but anyone reading 1.2X has got to be lying!

(***) Maybe you will! I’ll be impressed. Some people are impressive!

Keep on trying me

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I am bored and kvetchy and it’s making my anxiety act up something fierce. I actually got quite a lot done today– no big projects, but a ton of little jobs around the house and I got the oil changed on the car– but since the sun went down I’ve turned into a mess, and I can’t concentrate well enough to read.

That part’s the alarming part, honestly. It’s rare that I can’t focus enough to read. I’m watching someone else play a video game while I’m writing this, and I’m starting to think I need to dive back into Skyrim or something like that; I simultaneously need something new to do and am kind of aching for something familiar and comfortable I can just fall into.

I’m also, for the first time in several years, pretty excited (or at least not actively dreading) Christmas, mostly because I feel like I definitely won Christmas this year. I don’t know if other families do this thing, where they’re competitive about who gets each other the best gifts– hell, I don’t know if my family does this thing or if it’s just me– but one way or another it’s me, hi, I won Christmas, it’s me.

Anyway, I’m going to go take down the wallpaper in the library or something.

In which I have an illness

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Careful readers will notice that for some reason there are two copies of Disquiet Gods, Book Six of the Sun Eater series, on that shelf. Exceptionally detail-oriented humans might further notice that they are not exactly the same! The title is a different color, as is the author’s name, the character image is different, and so is the publisher. Further, one title is matte in finish and matches the other books precisely, and the top book appears to be glossy.

You might, just maybe, also notice that the top book is roughly a quarter inch taller than the books below it, but if you don’t, don’t worry; it just means that you’re neurotypical.

Shall I explain? Let me explain. Author and apparent personal nemesis Christopher Ruocchio originally had a five-book contract with DAW for the Sun Eater series. Upon writing five books and not completing the series, he asked for a two-book extension to the contract. DAW offered a single book. And Ruocchio said “bet” and bounced, taking the last two books of the series to Baen, where he used to work as an editor.

Oh, don’t worry, said Baen, we’ll make sure the new books match the old ones! Promise! We’ll use the same artist and everything! And, well, they did use the same artist, but they switched from the matte paper to the glossy paper and made the books ever-so-slightly taller, just different enough that I suspect no one noticed, me included, until the book was on the shelf with its series-mates.

And then a certain subset of humanity of which I am a member lost their minds, because why in the merry hell would you do your best to make sure that the books mostly match, except for those two kind of important details? You get no credit for that at all! None! We hate you!

(By “you,” I mean the publisher, a faceless corporate entity; I’m completely certain Ruocchio had nothing to do with this decision. The man is an author so I suspect he’s One of Us anyway.)

Here’s how they looked originally:

And, again, if that doesn’t bother you, it just means you’re normal. It’s okay to be normal. Also, the book isn’t deeper than the others, just … puffier? I don’t know why it looks so much further forward on the shelf than the books next to it.

Anyway, at some point DAW came to their senses? And apparently bought his contract with Baen out, and now they’re publishing the whole series again, including their version of the book that Baen originally published and the final book. I have to believe this cost them more money than just giving Ruocchio the two books he wanted at the beginning, but I have no idea. So the new DAW version of the book matches the rest precisely, as it should. I’m going to do another book cull over winter break, and the original version of the book will end up in the basement. I can imagine a universe where it’s worth slightly more than cover price in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

(For the record, I bought most of my Christmas presents with my Amazon card, which I get 5% back on. Not that paying for it would have stopped me, but I got the second copy of the book basically for free.)

This is, believe it or not, not the greatest spine-matching sin that has been perpetrated on my bookshelves. I bought an entire special edition of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series so that I didn’t have to look at this abomination any longer:

Again: why are they just sort of the same? Why change things, guaranteeing you’re going to enrage a certain portion of your readers, but just change them a little? If the shit’s not gonna match, just fuckin’ go nuts and completely redesign everything. This makes no Goddamn sense at all. I was already mad enough when Veiled Throne lost the gold and the embossed title, but I was willing to put up with it. The rest of those changes are just gratuitously evil.

I’m going to go take some sort of pill; I suspect I need one.

Not today, Satan

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Realized last night that I was developing a sore throat. It was worse this morning, and the winter storm meant a two-hour delay for every school district in northern Indiana and southern Michigan, so I decided just to stay home and stay in bed today so that I don’t lose a day that matters later in the week. I did find out today that we don’t have to give a final in 8th grade Math after all, which is awesome, but I’ve already got too much scheduled for the … (checks watch) … two and a half weeks I have left before Winter Break.

Still kinda feel cruddy, but I’m hoping if I go to bed soon and get 8-9 hours of sleep tonight I’ll be able to make it through the rest of the week. We’ll see.

In which I refrain

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocyLeave a comment

I did not buy anything this Black Friday,(*) not because of any particular moral stand or distaste toward capitalism, but mostly because nothing really crossed my radar that I wanted to buy. I did check lego.com this morning to see if there were any deals I was interested in; there were not.

I did manage to talk myself out of buying something; my wife and I have been talking about how we don’t want to get each other any Useless Crap this Christmas, and we mostly want to avoid getting the boy any Useless Crap as well. I have had my eyes on the odachi in the image above for a couple of weeks now, and I believe that I’ve successfully convinced myself not to buy it, and for the most ridiculous reason imaginable: an odachi is the kind of sword you use if you need to cut a horse in half. They are so big that there is apparently a school of Japanese historians that believe the swords were never actually used in combat at all. This particular one is 78″ long– six and a half feet.

My house has eight foot ceilings. My wingspan, fingertip to fingertip, and yes, I just went and measured, is right about 70″. There is, in other words, virtually nowhere in my house where I could unsheathe this giant bastard without worrying abut breaking things, and resheathing it afterward under any circumstances would be a challenge. Now, none of my little goofy-ass pile of weapons is ever going to see combat, fake or otherwise, so it’s not like I’m going to be doing sword practice in my living room or something like that, but if I’m gonna buy a sword that’s eight inches longer than my actual height, I’d like to be able to take it out of its sheath and swing the fucker around once in a while, and that would be absolutely impossible to do inside my house.

Which would require me to go outside carrying a six and a half foot long sword, and swing it around like a dork in my back yard, and while my lawn is fairly private, that’s not something I’m going to allow even a chance of someone else seeing. So, as sad as it makes me, no odachi for me.

(Given the price point, the sword in question is likely junk anyway, but again: I’m not buying these things for combat.)

Fun fact: the largest odachi ever forged is the fifteen foot long, 165-pound Great Evil-Crushing Blade, probably forged in the eighteenth or early nineteenth century.

I suspect I can’t afford that one.

(*) Upon reflection, not quite true– I impulse-bought my son an inexpensive Christmas present from what I believe is a small business. So I guess I spent, like, $15 on Black Friday, without leaving the house. Or did I do that yesterday? Hell, I don’t remember.

Burn the whole technology to the ground

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.

This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.

I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.

Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.

There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.

Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.