Tag: amazon

Some Sunday odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.

It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.

Today? Dead quiet.

We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.

I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.

This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.

After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.

You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?

And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.

#REVIEW: Kindle Paperwhite, Signature Edition

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews2 Comments

Having read an entire big-ass book on this thing (TEOTBB is 260,000 words) I can get to the meat of a review of my newest tech toy in a single sentence:

Reading a book on this thing feels like reading.

If you don’t know what I mean by that … I’m not sure how well I can explain it, to be honest. I have an earlier version of the Paperwhite– about ten years old now, so probably pretty close to the first generation– and on that device and every other Kindle I’ve ever touched, I was never able to forget I was holding a tech object with a screen and not a book. I couldn’t get into stories the same way I could with a book. I had trouble remembering details, or even keeping my place on a page. Reading short stories on the Kindle wasn’t bad, but entire books? Forget about it.

At some point in the last ten or so generations of this thing, they fixed that problem, and I’m not sure exactly what the difference is. I can say it’s tremendously faster than my old Paperwhite, which is no surprise, and since ebooks themselves haven’t really evolved all that much in that time you can really feel the speed difference in a way you might not be able to with a phone upgrade or a new laptop or something. It’s got a pleasing heft in the hand and while I wasn’t terribly happy with spending nearly $40 for a case at first, now that I have it I really like it. I got the fabric cover, and the texture is marvelous, both on the inside and the outside of the case, and the automatic wake-up/shut-off when you open and close the cover is a nice feature.

(Why did I spend $36 when I could have gotten a case much cheaper? It says “Kindle” on the cover and not some other random brand. If I’m going to put my device in a case, the case needs to be either featureless or branded for the device and not for whatever random company makes the case. Yes, I know that’s dumb. It’s how my brain works. That’s my original Paperwhite case under the new one up there, and you’ll notice there are no words on it.)

Battery life is going to be excellent– I’m not sure how long I spent reading that book, but it only ran the battery down to 81%. It says that “typical reading time” is just under 14 hours, but I don’t know if that’s how long I took in my one read or what. I was annoyed by the Kindle displaying when certain passages had been annotated by a ton of other people, but I was able to turn that off.

I spent a pleasant half-hour today rearranging my wish list on Amazon, moving fiction books by new authors into a new “Kindle Wish List” section, keeping books I know I want in print and nonfiction on my original wish list. I’m going to need to get into the habit of deciding I Shall Read A Kindle Book Now and buying the book right then from my wish list, because I still don’t like how this thing displays your library and anything I download and don’t read immediately is going to get lost. That will require a bit of an adjustment, but at least I know the reading part is going to work, and that’s good.

(Two more quick things: I just started Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain today, and it’s 1200 pages, and after holding it for a while I damn near shelled out another $17 to get a digital version that wasn’t going to torture my hands as much. I may still cave, we’ll see. Also, Bedlam Bride is unfairly fucking good; it’s the best book of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series so far, and as I’ve said repeatedly DCC already didn’t have any right to be as good as it is. I only have one book from the series left and then I have to wait for the rest of them to come out. I’m not happy about it.)

Dangit

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

I feel like I’ve been on another run of too many “taking the night off” posts lately, but … damn. I had a good day at work, went to the comic shop, came home, did a bunch of grading, and I’ve literally been sitting here staring at the screen for ten minutes trying to come up with something even remotely interesting or witty to talk about. This is the best I can do. This happened on Sunday:

Yes, that’s two Amazon vans, both at my house at the same time, suggesting that Amazon’s logistics aren’t maybe as good as they’ve always been cracked up to be. The packages were even both for the same person, so they don’t have that excuse. The second driver to arrive spent a few minutes either angrily venting or yelling at the first driver, waving his hands (and the package) around and hollering loudly enough that I could hear him from inside my house, although I couldn’t quite put together what he was saying. The other guy never got back out of his van and I suspect he was not enjoying the conversation one way or another. Then after a few minutes the first guy drove away, leaving the second guy in his pit of vitriol, and he brought the package to my porch and drove away, never to be seen again.

It’s not much of a story.

The end.

On school supplies and other annoying arguments

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I feel like there’s something in the air out there this year, where the standard beginning of school arguments are just a little bit louder and angrier than they have been in previous years. So lemme match some energy here.

This is showing itself in two major ways: the “I’m not buying any school supplies, or if I buy school supplies, every single thing is for my kid” crowd, and the people who slept through and/or failed large portions of their school experiences insisting that schools should teach skills that, generally, schools already teach. There’s a video floating around of some fifty-something dipshit loudly and obnoxiously insisting that schools need a class called “life,” and the first thing he suggests that the “life” class should teach is balancing a checkbook, a skill that no human being has needed in at least twenty years.

Lemme throw out a couple of real obvious comments:

  1. Teachers shouldn’t be responsible for spending a single dime for supplies in their classrooms. The fact that most of us do it anyway and that I do it more often than most is only evidence that I don’t have the courage of my convictions and that the entire enterprise is set up to take advantage of people with consciences.
  2. You’re responsible for your own Goddamned kid so buy the fucking supplies.
  3. If your teacher lets your kid keep their crayons, fine. If your teacher puts all the crayons into a communal pot and lets kids take them as necessary, fine. Either way, buy the fucking crayons and shut the fuck up unless you want me showing up at your job and criticizing your cocksucking technique.
  4. Also, no one is trying to take your kid’s backpack, idiot. No one is advocating for communal lunchboxes. But there’s no reason why little Tragedeigh’s crayons and Kleenex can’t be shared among the class.
  5. There are other places for people to learn things that are not schools, and if you think there is some specific skill that your child lacks that genuinely isn’t taught in the schools any longer, you will not lose custody of your child if you teach them that skill yourself.
  6. That said, I took Home Ec and several shop classes in middle school. I remember having a genuinely good time in my shop classes, including one on architectural drafting. Mr. Korkhouse was awesome. If you want them back, that’s great; maybe advocate for a model in education where things that aren’t directly measurable by standardized tests still get to matter? Believe me, you won’t find any teachers who disagree with you here.
  7. In addition, the vast number of things that these people claim are not being taught in school actually are being taught in school, or if they aren’t being explicitly taught, they’re being taught by inference. IE, if you actually want to balance a checkbook for some fucking reason– I don’t know, maybe you’re at a Ren Faire or something– you need to be able to a) read, b) add, and c) subtract. We teach all of those things. Same shit with “nobody taught me how to do my taxes!” except add multiplying and dividing.

Anyway, that’s all an irate and profane lead-in to my yearly bleg; my readers have been excessively generous over the last few years, and while I don’t think you should be on the hook for buying shit for my classroom any more than I am, some of you are willing to buy shit anyway. My classroom Amazon wishlist is here, and school starts in about two weeks. If anyone cares to chip in some folders or some dry-erase markers, I will be immensely grateful.

I buy books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading1 Comment

This week involved– this is not a joke– both having a condom thrown at me and being inadvertently punched in the balls by a student, so, having survived it, I was in serious need of some retail therapy. I went to Barnes and Noble.

Do both of us a favor and don’t add up the cost of any of this.

I purchased Ron Chernow’s doorstop-sized, thousand page, recently-released biography of Mark Twain immediately, but not from Barnes and Noble. This one was expensive enough that I actually ordered it from Amazon, while still in the store, for 2/3 of the cost. It’ll be here tomorrow.

What I’ve started doing when I’m in bookstores is buying books I wasn’t previously familiar with, rather than grabbing things that are already on my wish list. I’ve learned that if I walk into my local B&N looking for something specific I am sure to be disappointed. It will not be there. (To wit: I have the absolutely gorgeous Broken Binding edition of Joe Abercrombie’s new book, The Devils, and was looking for the standard edition as a reading copy. Couldn’t find it. Unbelievable.)

Anyway, this caught my eye, and as a standalone and a debut novel it felt like the perfect kind of bookstore buy.

Then I decided to look around for a specific book that I’d seen the last time I was in the store, The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali. It wasn’t there! Again, any time I’m looking for a specific book, it is never there. But her debut novel was:

So, two or three purchases depending on how you’re counting, one by an established author that I’m certain to enjoy, two debut novels that I’m rolling dice on, no series fiction. So far so good! But then this one caught my eye:

I’m not even completely sure what drew me to this, and I picked it up and put it back down a couple of times, as the plot feels a little been-there-done-that in some ways, but by this point I was in full “fuck it” mode. Speaking of:

I did not buy any Dungeon Crawler Carl books, but these hardcover editions are appealing to my inner book-collector magpie; they’re big chonky bois in bright, appealing covers and I bet they’ll look great on the shelf. I also suspect they might be terrible? I dunno. Anyone read them?

My final purchase was this one:

This was actually the first book I physically touched after entering the store, as I saw it before the Twain book. I have not heard of the author, nor have I heard of his first book, and after flipping it over I realized that I have also not heard of any of the three authors with big pull quotes on the back, nor have I heard of any of the five books of theirs that were mentioned, and the quotes are genuinely wankstrous. Shit, this was probably a literature. I put it back.

Then, while looking for the Kamali book, I went back to the new fiction section to make sure it wasn’t still there, and … well, it turns out that Kamali and Larison are right next to each other on the shelf. So I picked it up again, leafed through it a bit, and put it back again.

Then, while deciding on The Outcast Mage, I decided that even though I’d had a vague plan to pick up three standalone books, and Outcast wasn’t one of those, I could still get it if I bought another standalone in addition to it, and somehow I ended up walking out of the store with The Ancients as well, figuring that this was a pretty precise example of how sometimes the books decide I’m buying them and not the other way around. I think this is the literary equivalent of being adopted by a cat. Hopefully I enjoy it.

I almost want to make this a separate post, but it is just my Barnes & Noble that is really hitting customer service and talking about books super hard, or is that a corporation-wide thing? Because the woman at the register was practically fucking interviewing the two people in front of me, making each transaction take so long that they had to call someone else to run a register because the line was building up. I was simultaneously stressing out about the conversation– what the hell is the name of the book I’m reading? Who is the author again?– and quietly scorning some of her choices, because I swear by God and sunny Jesus that if I walk up to you with a handful of fantasy books and you do what she did to the guy in front of me and ask if I’ve heard of Brandon fucking Sanderson, I may not be able to keep the look of disdain off of my face. She pivoted from “have you heard of the single most famous author in this genre in a generation” straight to recommending the Licanius trilogy by James Islington, making the second time in a row that I have been at that Barnes and Noble and someone has recommended those books, and I had the same reaction both times, which is that I usually don’t believe people when they tell me they’ve read them.

Also, there are like fifteen steps in fantasy book-reading between Brandon Sanderson and James Islington. It’s like finding out someone enjoys Goosebumps and recommending Lovecraft to them.

Anyway, the new register person ended up helping me, and did so without any unnecessary questions, which is good, because there was no way I was getting out of that conversation without some form of idiotic faux pas.

The end.

On boycotts, again

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics6 Comments

I am, and have been for many years, boycotting Chick-fil-A.

Why? Well, you probably already know: the company and its ownership are far too mired in anti-LGBTQ bigotry for me to be willing to give them my money. Critically, I would like to give them my money, as their chicken is fucking delicious and I have two Chick-fil-A restaurants within easy dining distance. I am both capable of eating at Chick-fil-A and, were they to recant their bullshit, entirely willing to eat at Chick-fil-A. I miss their Goddamn sandwiches. That is, you see, what makes it a boycott. I’m also not eating at Jack In The Box. They don’t exist in my part of the country, so it’s not a boycott even if they gave all of their proceeds directly to Nazis. I don’t eat at Applebee’s despite their easy availability because by and large I think their food is garbage. That’s not a boycott either.

I am– and this is far from the first time I’ve said this here– not willing to call something a boycott unless I am deliberately withholding my money from a business or other organization, for political reasons, when in the absence of said political beliefs I would be both willing and able to spend my money with that business or organization. And before I wrote this post I actually sat down and spent some time looking into Tesla to see if I could afford one. The surprising answer: under certain circumstances, yes, so the fact that I will never willingly purchase a Tesla because Elon Musk is a shitstain actually takes precedence over the fact that they have that weird habit of catching on fire or running children over. I wouldn’t buy one if they were good cars. Which kinda makes me think I should rework my definition a bit, because there needs to be som room for “This thing sucks and I hate it, but even if it didn’t suck I wouldn’t buy it because politics.” It’s also kind of weird to talk about boycotting something like a car company, where I’ve had the same car since 2018 and have no intention of replacing it anytime soon. I’m not buying another Kia anytime soon either, and I drive one of those right now.

But anyway. That’s actually not the point.

I just today became aware of an app called Goods Unite Us, which purports to allow you to look up companies to find out where they direct their political contributions that you can … well, so that you can do whatever you want with that information, I suppose. And what triggered this post was me thinking about exactly how far the don’t want none won’t be none policy goes, and whether I should be applying it to corporations. That’s always been my policy regarding people; J.K. Rowling and Dan Simmons and Orson Scott Card and insert whoever here have all made it very clear that they are boils on humanity’s collective asshole, so I don’t read their shit any longer. It’s entirely possible that any of the authors I do read torture puppies in their spare time; the deal is, I’m not gonna go looking, but if you make your jackassery clear in public, well, I’m going to respond accordingly.

But what about corporations? Is the line there the same? I mean, the single corporation that I spend the most money with is absolutely Amazon, and it’s not close, and I know Amazon is shady as fuck, beyond a shadow of a damn doubt. Has that altered my behavior? No. The second-highest, at least before I start looking at bills, is my local comic shop, and the owners run the place. I have abandoned a comic shop in the past when the owner turned out to be an asshole, but I’m pretty sure that’s not going to turn out to be the case with these folks. Beyond that … Target, maybe? A restaurant of some sort? Verizon? Are we counting the bank that holds my mortgage? My local credit union?

And the thing is, capitalism (and America) being what they are, I know full and Goddamn well that if I look hard enough I’m going to find something shitty about just about everybody sooner or later, or at least “everybody” in the context of large companies or corporations. How much research do I owe it to myself/my ideals/whatever to do, and where’s the line on corporate malfeasance? Like, it’s interesting to me that I dropped Chick-fil-A when on balance Amazon is almost certainly more destructive than they are. But CFA’s evil is specific, and I can point to how what they do harms friends of mine. Amazon is shitty but I’m not sure I can point to a specific policy of theirs that has caused harm to someone I know. They treat their workers like shit and are viciously anti-union; I am myself a literal union member, but the one person I know who worked at Amazon actually liked the job.

There is also the minor detail that part of the reason I use Amazon for nearly everything nowadays is because Amazon has been so destructive and has made it so difficult for brick and mortar businesses to stay alive. I don’t go to a brick and mortar any longer unless I know I can find what I’m looking for there; the notion that I might hit three or four stores looking for something is just no longer a part of my experience.

I dunno. I’m mostly thinking out loud here, and I find it useful to occasionally step back and examine my decisions and thought processes on these things once in a while. What about you? Will you use that app? Under what circumstances?

In which I almost blow it

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

I was getting ready for bed just now, and I realized two things at the same moment:

  • That I had not blogged today, and that given the tenor of my week it would not be unreasonable to assume that I had not, in fact, made it through the last student day before Winter Break without going to jail. Fear not! My unbroken record of days where I didn’t kill a child and go to jail remains an unbroken record, and in fact today was probably easier than I was expecting it to be.
  • We had a pajama day at work today– no, I did not participate– and I was expecting a horror show of uniform issues. What I got instead (and, really, what I should have expected) was that everyone wore comfy pants and untucked T-shirts. There were a scattered few brave kids in onesies mostly as jokes and a few in proper pajamas, but mostly everybody showed up in their flannels. It was probably the most chill out of uniform day we’ve had this year, honestly.
  • That’s not the second thing. Consider it a bonus.
  • This is the second thing: that I actually still have an Amazon delivery coming today– it has been projected to arrive between 8:00 and 10:00 PM all day– and I kind of feel like I owe it to the driver to not be in bed while they, a fellow human being who is still at work, delivers my irrelevant shit to my house.
  • In fact, I’m gonna go turn the driveway light on.

I expect to be leaving work by noon tomorrow; I have some light grading and classroom rearranging to do and that’s it. After that? Coma time, which is my favorite time.

CLICK now available for pre-order!

On By Luther M. SilerIn WritingLeave a comment

And you can click– no pun intended– right here to make my latest book a part of your life. Release date is July 26, but why would you wait that long to buy it when you can make an impulse decision right now? This is my wife’s favorite of my books, so you should absolutely listen to her and go order it immediately.

I will be out of town all weekend, so updates are gonna be kinda sparse, but there’s already video content uploaded and waiting over at the yootoobz and nothing can keep me off of Twitter, so the dozens of you who plan your lives around my social media update schedule should be just fine. I will return Sunday, by which time I expect my body to be approximately 50% baklava and shawarma by weight. It’s gonna be a fine few days.