Tag: christmas

Family time!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

So what does family time look like when everyone in the house is an introvert?

The boy and I working on Lego sets while my wife works on a puzzle, all of us in the same room, but with minimal conversation happening, because we’re all concentrating.

I’ve been working on the Notre Dame set a few bags at a time for the last several days, but I picked up this AT-AT today and decided to take a break and get this done in one sitting. The Notre Dame set is beautiful, but it’s also crazily repetitive and I didn’t have the strength tonight to make 32 more windows or 10 more flying buttresses. I noticed the instruction manual had a link to the new Lego Builder app, and holy hell, I’m never touching one of the manuals again other than to look through them for the little flavor details they like to sprinkle through them. The app surrounds any new pieces for any particular step with a little glowing aura, making it way harder to miss them than in the manuals, and you can rotate and enlarge the model on the screen.

That’s a Goddamn game-changer right there. Lego manuals are impressively well put together 95% of the time, but sometimes there’s just no way to display a step with one single perfect angle, and letting me zoom and rotate at will was just amazing. Plus they gave me stats at the end, and y’all know how much I like stats. Turns out if you were to stack all of the pieces in that AT-AT on top of one another (I assume the long way, and not actually attaching them to each other?) it would be 6 meters high! I also managed to put together 7 pieces per minute in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to put the set together. I don’t know what the hell I could possibly do with that information, but I love that I have it.

A nearly perfect Christmas Eve

On By Luther M. SilerIn life2 Comments

I’ve been in sweatpants and a hoodie all day.

Haven’t left the house. Not going to tomorrow, either.

Got some reading done. Took a nice nap in my recliner this afternoon. Spent a couple of hours gaming– if you’re looking for something to fall into before the world starts up again, you could do worse than Tainted Grail: Fall of Avalon. And now that the boy’s in bed, I’m going to wrap the rest of the Christmas presents.

Wherever you are and whatever you’re doing, I hope it’s peaceful.

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.

That can’t be right

On By Luther M. SilerIn life, Parenting1 Comment

Not that my immediate family is that large, but I’m done with all Christmas shopping for my immediate family, and everyone else is pretty much gift card people. My brother will send me a list for my niece and nephew, who are too young to get mad at me for buying the wrong thing anyway, and the basement goblin will likely get cash. The tree went up after Thanksgiving and I’ve been changing the lights every time I walk into the living room just because I can.

(Seriously, Govee lights are amazing. Ignore the price; order these. They’re absolutely worth every dime.)

Anyway, what this means is that everything’s going to show up broken, or not show up at all, or I’m suddenly going to realize four days before Christmas that my wife and son don’t actually like any of the things I got them for Christmas and I’ve somehow accidentally ordered a ton of stuff for me instead. This is actually a bit of a risk with the boy; he and I have enough tastes in common that I actually rejected a gift I was thinking about for him this year because I decided I wanted it and not him. He’d have liked it, I think, but it was a little too expensive for “he’d have liked it, I think.”

I have one thing left to do for my wife, which is going to involve Doing Art, and which will be a funny joke even if I completely fuck up Doing the Art. She looks at the blog kind of irregularly, so I could probably get away with telling y’all the plan, but … nah.

How’s your shopping going?

In which I suck and it’s a lot of fun

On By Luther M. SilerIn artLeave a comment

We finally, after a reschedule or two, had our much-anticipated wheel throwing class tonight– the final part of my Christmas present, four months later. My pot, such as it is, is the one on the left, and the second of my wife’s two is in the back right. My first attempt was too terrible to even make it to the drying room; I essentially just let it die and go back to the recycling pile, and while our instructor really thought MLW should save her first one too, she thought the second was better.

Throwing pottery is really hard, as it turns out. That doesn’t actually surprise me– I was fully expecting to suck at this– but it was still a bit startling just how difficult things like “keep your fingers the same distance apart” can be. That doesn’t sound hard! But it is. You can see on my pot that there are a few places in the middle where it thins out abruptly, and that’s the same on the other side too, but one way or another it’s still a vast improvement over my first effort and I’m glad I ended up with something at least a little passable.

We want to take a whole bunch of other classes at this place, and I can easily see myself wanting to take the throwing class again just to have an expert on hand for when I inevitably screw up again. It’s super cheap just to go in there, buy some clay, and rent the wheel for a while, and we can do it any time they’re open, but I feel like it’d be wasted money until I can at least internalize the various hand positions for the different steps in the process. I need somebody around to tell me what I’m doing wrong and how to fix it if that’s possible.

(One random fun thing: the way you remove a piece of pottery, whether it’s good or complete failure, from the “bat”– that’s the disc it spins on– is by sliding a thin wire underneath it to slice it away from the bat. That has, for some reason, always looked like an intensely satisfying experience, and the best thing about my first attempt being a terrible piece of crap is I got to slice it off the bat. I am proud to report that that’s the thing I was best at, and it was exactly as pleasing as I thought it would be.)

We also have our mugs now, from our last attempt at this. We will glaze both items at once when the pots are done drying.

Merry Christmas

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

A lot of the time I reserve Christmas to post about something ridiculous, since no one is paying attention. I got nothing today, and since we did Christmas three times today I am also kind of collapsing from exhaustion. So I hope your day went well one way or another, and I’ll see you tomorrow.

Go home, Fromsoft, you’re drunk

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

God pissed in my face last night, by allowing me to briefly believe that there was either a second DLC or an actual by-God sequel to Elden Ring coming in 2025. The phrase co-op multiplayer roguelite does not make me happy, God damn it, and while it might still be something I play it is absolutely not something I want, and when you start off by getting me all sloppy about the idea of a surprise reveal of a sequel to one of my favorite games of all time, anything other than “this is a sequel or another big DLC” is going to be a letdown.

Par for the Goddamned course for 2024, of course, which just in the last 24 hours has also featured a so-far underwhelming Snoop Dogg/Dr. Dre collaboration and The Cure deciding to release a second version of their latest album with an entire live album attached to it, when the original album has only been out for a few weeks. The whole world is making me stabbity, is what I’m saying here.

(The Cure’s album-plus-concert is only $9.99, so I bought it anyway, but … if you’re gonna sell it for just ten fucking bucks, why not release the concert separately? I don’t need another version of the original album even if they’re both digital and technically not taking up any space anywhere!)

Also while I’m bitching I refuse to accept Astro Bot as Game of The Year. Yes, I know I haven’t played it. I don’t care if that’s unreasonable. I say no and that’s the end of it.

I feel like I should end that with some good news, and the truth is I’m not even in that bad of a mood; other than Tuesday, which was genuinely awful, this wasn’t that bad of a week. I really need to finish up my Christmas shopping this weekend, because … I’m not going to go into a rant about shopping, but I don’t know how retail stores expect me to avoid Amazon if they don’t ever have anything I’m looking for. I went to Target earlier and couldn’t find tape. Or, at least, I could only find the kind that’s already on the little plastic shell and not refills for my tape dispenser on my desk at work, which is what I wanted.

Damn it that’s bitching again. Finishing Christmas shopping! That’s something I need to do. I need more/better stuff for my wife and my son and maybe something for my sister-in-law. Everybody else is done.

Yeah. Christmas shopping and books and then five days until Winter Break. I can do this. Who else do you need to shop for?

We put the tree up

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I recommend books and music and video games all the damn time, but I don’t stray into other products all that often. Let me say that you could spend as much as you wanted on Govee Christmas lights and they would be worth every dime:

They have a feature where you point your phone at the tree after you put the lights on, and then the app maps where the lights are, which allows you to pull off effects like this, which come from the center of the tree:

Just fucking awesome. There’s literally hundreds of preset patterns even before you get to the user-customizable ones or, y’know, just colors, and it’s all kinds of fun to sit in front of the tree and just fiddle with the app.

Meanwhile, we’re expecting 4-7″ of snow tonight, so if y’all want to start doing the Dance of Two-Hour Delay, that’d be great. I don’t actually want a snow day tomorrow because that makes the rest of the week really fucking complicated but a couple of hours of extra sleep in the morning would not be looked askance upon.

Also, yes, that’s a stuffed quetzalcoatlus as a tree topper. My son’s idea.