The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I look forward to discovering how this is STILL worse than the one I started with later on today.
At any rate: having had another seriously low-productivity day yesterday, I have resolved to play no Fallout and write no blogs until Sunlight has at least 20000 words, and I really ought to shoot for at least 21-22K today.
So don’t tell anyone about this post. It’s our secret.
Leave encouragement in comments. Or, y’know, whatever.
If we were having coffee, I’d probably be doing my level best to drag the conversation out for as long as possible. There’s about a foot of grading in the car, and I didn’t assign any of it and I don’t know what any of it is, so you can probably imagine how excited I am about getting to it as soon as possible.
It’s been a busy few days. We had friends over for dinner Thursday, which meant that I spent the entire day cleaning and prepping and cooking for seven. One of the extra four was another four-year-old, my son’s best friend, and they spent the evening carefully tearing apart my nice clean house, so I’m glad I made sure the place was spotless. We had dinner at my in-laws’ Friday night, and yesterday we went to the zoo and then had dinner over at my parents’ place. What this means is that I haven’t touched Sunlight in a few days. Now, I’m not officially doing NaNoWriMo, so there’s no actual notion of being “behind” to work with here, but I would like to get a lot more writing done in this upcoming week than I did in the previous one.
Also, I managed to get through the week with a minimum of panic-attack related stress. I’m pretty sure I actually pushed one away at one point, too. Which is all good.
I’m pretty sure NaNo would be impossible this month anyway. We’re doing Thanksgiving twice; one of my best friends will be in town all next weekend for the first one, and I’ll be in Indianapolis at a conference the weekend after normal Thanksgiving. There is no earthly way I’m going to get any writing done in Indianapolis. It’s not even worth considering. So that’s at least three if not six days I’m already down. If I end the month halfway through the manuscript (currently targeted at 75K words) I’ll be happy. I should finish up the first major section today at right around the 25% mark, so that’s all good.
You are, hopefully, also playing Fallout 4, so that we might discuss that for a moment too. I’m enjoying the hell out of it although I don’t expect to have a lot of time for it the next few weeks.
The job front is … well, about the same. More on that next week, maybe.
Also, I’ve decided I’m done with Force Awakens footage until I see the movie. I’m not trying to put myself on a spoiler blackout or anything, I just feel like I know enough. I’m still not convinced it’s going to be appropriate for my son, which is kind of disappointing, but I’d love to be wrong.
Love to be wrong.
How’re you?
The world does not need more hatred and anger at the moment, and that’s legitimately everything I’ve got, so I’m taking the day off, or at least taking it off until the copious amounts of mood-altering drugs I’m supposed to be taking actually succeed in altering some moods. Until then:
Two kinda long days in a row, and I cannot word at the moment. Lots to do tomorrow, too, including getting caught up on Sunlight, which I haven’t touched in a couple of days.
What are people with lives doing this Friday night? There’s gotta be something fun going on somewhere.
I think this number should have five more zeroes and one more two in it by the end of the day. Someone out there with nothing to do, go exploring!
It is, as I’m typing this, 7:54 in the AM, and I’ve not had coffee, because my coffeepot won’t coffeepot fast enough. I want to be playing Fallout 4, but I have a rule right now, and that rule is words before video games, so I gotta at least talk about Fallout 4 before I can go play Fallout 4.
I’m starting to really detest this generation of consoles. Now, in the strict interest of honesty, I need to point out that all I have is a PS4, but I have not heard anything better about the Xbox One. Trying to play Fallout the other night required not only an update to the console itself (for network features that I have no interest in and will never ever ever ever ever ever ever use, because if I want to be called the N-word by a nine year old I’ll go to work) but a probably forty minute long installation sequence, during which the game played seven different videos that I couldn’t skip through. The first two were cute, at which point I realized the game really did think I was going to watch the other five and I felt part of my soul die.
I turned off the volume and went to do something else. At least, unlike the vile Metal Gear Solid V, this game didn’t pretend its stupid videos were part of the story. All that said, I would have preferred a goddamn progress bar against a black screen, because that would definitely have signaled go do something else and not this will be cute and funny for five minutes, bearable for ten, and will raise your blood pressure noticeably for the next thirty.
Anyway. Eventually I did actually get to play a game, and I got to choose what I looked like, and it actually mattered, again unlike Metal Gear Solid V, where I still don’t understand why they let me choose what I looked like and then made me look like a mulleted, one-eyed hobo anyway.
Apparently the main story of this game involves saving my kidnapped infant son, which is sorta triggery, by the way, and actually affected my choice of how to play my character, because this lady’s gonna kill the hell out of everything in her way until I find the damn baby. There will be precious few sidequests done before the main quest is finished.
Oh, right. And then, an hour in, they threw this motherfucker at me. Spoilers, but only real mild ones, and you’ve already seen the picture anyway, and it’s an hour in so shut up about spoilers anyway:
Now, maybe you don’t play video games, or maybe you don’t play Fallout 4, so you’re not going Oh, holy shit, are you kidding? right now. In that case, note that that giant fucker is called a Deathclaw, and understand that it earns that name, and take notice that it looks like a dinosaur on steroids on purpose, and also understand that throwing that thing at you as part of literally one of the game’s very first missions is a sign that the game is not fucking around at all with you and that you probably ought to get used to that shit right now.
It killed me five or six times and I went to bed. Now it’s 8:12 AM, and I’m awake, and my coffee is probably ready by now, so I’m gonna go find a way to kill this nasty sumbitch because I have a lot to do today– we are actually having people over for dinner tonight, so I gotta cook, plus Sunlight, plus cleaning, plus a good half-dozen other miscellaneous chores that are probably good for a couple of hours. Also, the wind is blowing outside like I cannot believe so at some point a tree will probably fall on the house.
But first I gotta kill my ass a Deathclaw and dance on the corpse.
More later.
EDIT: Kilt.
So, turns out this is actually posted Wednesday. I feel like if I write it on Wednesday it’ll get a little more attention, plus the weekends are starting to get a little bit hashtag-heavy, so we’ll do this on the day it launches for a bit.
“It’s been a year,” the girl in white said. She picked at a scab on her knee.
“That’s right,” the woman in white answered. “Tomorrow, we learn.”
“Do we really have to stay up all night?”
“He was your father,” the woman answered. “For your father, we wait all night.”
“And if he rises?”
“If he rises with gladness, we welcome him. If he does not rise, we leave him.”
“And if he rises without gladness?”
“Then we shall see,” she answered. The ceremonial knife dug at her back. She would have to decide swiftly who it was for.
(100 words)
Friday Fictioneers is a weekly blog hop hosted by Rochelle. She posts a photo prompt then challenges readers to write a 100 word story inspired by the prompt. It’s a fun challenge. Give it a try! Check here for the info then write your story and post it, link up and enjoy the other stories!
If we were having coffee, I’d probably be talking about books. I’m thisclose to being finished with the Neal Stephenson book I’ve been pounding away at for what seems like forever but is probably only about a week and a half (checks Goodreads; two weeks on the nose) and once I have it finished I have books by damn near every favorite author I have sitting on the shelf waiting for me. Seriously, check the list: Salman Rushdie, Chuck Wendig, Matt Wallace, Cherie Priest, Seanan McGuire, Tana French, Stephen King, and that’s just the ones I can remember. Plus a couple of books by new authors I’m excited about and some intriguing nonfiction.
My unread shelf may be a little bigger than usual right now.
Seveneves is definitely getting a review in this space, because it’s fantastic and broken in a very interesting way, and I’d probably dance around it without actually spoiling anything because that’s what the review’s for.
I might mention that Fallout 4 comes out this week, and that buying Fallout 4 may well represent the last money I’m allowed to spend on myself in 2015, because as of yesterday I’m on medical leave until January of 2016. Yep, the rest of the semester.
That, uh, might halt the talk about geekery and books and video games. But it means that the Skylights sequel is sure as hell gonna come out on time, because WTF else am I going to have to do with myself? I don’t know how to be on medical leave. I don’t know how to behave, especially since I tend to report damn near every life activity on this here blog and I’m kinda paranoid that somebody’s gonna be all hey did you hear he did this while he was on medical leave is he allowed to do that???
Mental illness is a bitch, y’all, even the kind I have, where I kinda feel like I’m overstating the case by even calling it mental illness, but apparently I’m mentally ill enough that both my family doctor and my therapist signed paperwork stating that I can’t go back to work until we figure the panic attacks and anxiety disorder out, which they expect to take until the middle of January. And yet 90% of the time, I’m fine. It’s just that that other ten percent is fucking awful and rather annoyingly difficult to predict, and it tends to interfere with my ability to reliably teach children.
But yeah. Enough of that; I’m tired of talking about my brain on here. Let’s talk about how Sanctum of the Sphere is free today and how everyone who hasn’t yet should download it. Let’s talk about Dark Souls 2, which I have to somehow put to bed before I start playing Fallout (yeah, right) and how seeing a video about a little game called CounterSpy on Penny Arcade got me to buy it and I’m having more fun playing it than I did Metal Gear Solid V.
Let’s talk about how I keep adding new comic books, and how I’m gonna have to pare that down what with the loss of income, but holy crap guys are comic books good right now.
Anything but my stupid brain. I’m tired of that. And as it turns out, I have plenty of free time for other stuff now.
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