On schadenfreude and self-improvement

On March 19, 2017March 19, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

So there’s this house I drive past basically every time I have any reason to drive north, and since I live on the south side of town “heading north” happens quite a bit. It’s a shitty house. There’s mold on the siding, visible plant life growing in the gutters, the roof is rotting, and the garage is not anywhere close to plumb. I suspect I could push the thing over if I wanted to, and there have been nights on the way home where I was tempted to get out of my car and do so.

There have also been a couple of prominent Confederate battle flags flying prominently around the house for the last several years. They keep moving them; sometimes they’re on the garage, sometimes by the side door, sometimes in the windows, sometimes just flying off the back of the shitty rusted-out pickup truck that you were already picturing in their side yard even without me telling you it was there.

I have no idea who lives there, but I kind of hate them. I don’t need to see your racist bullshit every time I leave my fucking house, and at this point anyone still willing to fly one of those symbols of treason over their house is pretty clearly signaling they’re not someone I’m going to enjoy associating with at all. These people are almost certainly assholes of some stripe or another and I don’t feel bad about not liking them on reflex.

The last couple of weeks I’ve noticed the flags were gone, and sometime in the last day or two a bunch of bank auction signs have sprouted up around the house. So it looks like the bank foreclosed on whoever lived there and is trying to sell this half-decayed house to recoup some of its costs.

And my first thought upon seeing all this was Good. Fuck ’em.

I’d like to be the kind of person who doesn’t celebrate in even a minor way when people lose their homes. For all I know there are kids living there who don’t deserve to be tarred with their parents’ asshole brushes.

I bet they’ve found a way to blame black people for them losing their house, though. Which brings me back to “Fuck ’em.”

Sigh.

So much for that, I guess

On November 16, 2015November 16, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy19 Comments

tumblr_inline_n04m1jSVXI1rxlkcn So as part of my list of Morning Things that I was going to do today, I planned on paying at least the 30% deposit for my booth at C2E2 this March. Now, they want $912 for the booth, so even the deposit is just south of $300.

Shit shoulda taken five minutes, and only taken that long because I would have needed that extra three-digit number from the back of the card and so I’d have had to go find it.

It is now an hour and a half later, and I’ve invented some swear words in the meantime. These people simply do not want my money. I want to pay that bill with a credit card, because … well, fuck you, you don’t actually need a reason, I want to pay for it with a credit card because it’s 20goddamn15 and you can pay for everything with fucking credit cards.

They want either a paper “company check” sent to them (I don’t know what the difference between a “company check” and a “personal check” is, and my Prostetnic account doesn’t have a checkbook anyway) or a wire transfer or for me to give them a forty dollar convenience fee to use a credit card.

To do a wire transfer would be possible but it appears that I would have to open a checking account on my Bank of America card, which isn’t the account I wanted to use anyway, and then I’d have to pay them a fee. I am not opening any additional accounts with anyone and I am not paying any third parties, particularly Bank of Fucking America, any sort of fee in order to pay Reed Exhibitions some money that they apparently don’t want from me anyway. And I’ll offer my body as a masturbatory aid for horses before I pay any fucker $40 to use a credit card in 2015.

Irate emails have been sent; I doubt they will get me anywhere, which means Reed Exhibitions doesn’t want my money and I will therefore not be attending the convention after all. Given that I was almost certain to lose money on the effort anyway I am sure as shined shit going to spend money so that I can send them money.

Fuckit.

This has eaten my entire morning, by the way, and I’m way too pissed off to transition straight into writing right now, so I’m going to take a shower and eat lunch and then hopefully have an insanely productive goddamn afternoon. I should send these fuckers a bill; my time is worth money and they have wasted a hell of a lot of it this morning with this nonsense.

In which things are annoying in new ways

On March 11, 2015March 11, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Writing11 Comments

Credit cards chained up with padlock I appear to have fallen victim to the most minor identity theft of all time; a single charge of just over $50 to a Family Dollar in Atlanta, Georgia that just showed up on my online statement. As I have not been to Atlanta at any point in my life, much less in the last two days, I quickly cancelled the card and get to go to my bank branch tomorrow and do a spot of paperwork. I checked all of the rest of my cards and they’re all clean; this weekend I’ll change all of my passwords.

Yesterday I made the terrible mistake of trying to add an “Also by Luther Siler” page to my pre-existing ebook manuscript for The Benevolence Archives. It led me down this lovely little rabbit hole where, after adding that page, a Prostetnic logo, and fixing the three places where I screwed up and referred to Lady Remember as “he,” the Amazon converter that turns my .doc file into a .mobi for the Kindle told me I had thirty-some spelling errors. The vast majority of them were words with no spaces in between, which is not normally a typo I’d allow to slide past– much less thirty times.

I checked the manuscript. Spaces in the proper places, every single time. Weirdly, the word before the space tended to be a single italicized word. In other words:

“I can’t believe Amazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.

became

“I can’t believeAmazon is putting me through this bullshit,” Brazel said.

I actually rewrote every set of words where this happened, sometimes removing the italics and a few times where I felt they were really necessary leaving them in but carefully italicizing just the word and nothing else. Viewed the file in two or three different ways to make sure it wasn’t an artifact of the viewer’s insistence on full justification. Nothing made any difference. The next step is to put two spaces after each of those words and see if that fixes it. I promise the spaces are there in the source document; this is just a weird-ass artifact of the conversion process, and at the moment I don’t have a way to turn a .doc into a .mobi on my computer to dodge the need to use their converter.

Then, once I gave up on that frustration for the evening, I discovered that for some reason it doesn’t seem to be pushing the updated version through to my Kindle anyway, so the new version, which ought to be pushed out to replace old versions for anyone who hasn’t deliberately turned that feature off, appears to only be working for new downloads– and since I’ve already downloaded the book, I can’t download it again to double-check– I’ve tried to force my Kindle to update the file every way I can think of and it won’t do it, so I can’t check to see if the typos are just in the online viewer and I can’t get the book to recognize that the “Also by” page is supposed to be there. It won’t work on the Kindle app on my phone or my actual Kindle, although come to think of it I may not have downloaded the app on my new iPad so I may try that next.

So yeah. I’m frustrated. If, by some magic, you happen to download BA from Amazon tonight, I’d appreciate you letting me know if you get a version of the file with the “Also by Luther” page at the back– you’d be able to tell immediately, because the Prostetnic Publications logo is on the first page in the new one too. I need to know if the changes went through and if the space-omissions are there– they’re most common in the story called “Remember”.

Might even throw in a free copy of the new book once it comes out, actually, if you were to do that and tell me what happened.

(EDIT: Okay, I may have figured out the non-updating thing, as apparently you need to increment the “edition” number to make Amazon realize the new file is “important” changes. I’ve done that. The version up there now should still be different for new buyers, though, so the deal in the previous two paragraphs still stands. I have a hunch those errors will disappear when viewed on an actual Kindle device or through the app.)