Tag: cleaning

#REVIEW: Crime Scene Cleaner (Xbox Series X, 2024)

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews, video games3 Comments

I can’t believe I mean this: right now a game called Crime Scene Cleaner is somehow one of my favorite games of 2025. That sentence is true. I have spent twelve hours or so mopping up blood, moving bodies, and picking up broken glass in a video game, and it may be the most chill and genuinely relaxing game I’ve ever played.

The premise is real, real simple: you’re a janitor who gets hired by a mob boss to clean up after his people. You take the job because you need money to pay for your daughter’s hospital bills, which makes this the most American game of 2025. You accept jobs through your computer and the occasional phone call from “Big Jim,” the guy who signs your checks. You have a dog. There’s an achievement for petting the dog 15 times. The crime scenes range from a small apartment to an entire museum to a giant warehouse. At the end of each job you get paid based on how thorough a job you did; money can be used, not to pay for your daughter as you might think, but to upgrade your cleaning tools, accomplished through a skill tree, so you honest-to-God might pay for an upgrade to how much blood your mop can clean up before you have to wring it out in a bucket, and you can also upgrade how many detergents you can add to the bucket at once. By the end of the game you’re able to dual-wield sponges, which is not a phrase anyone had ever said or thought of before this game came out.

There is something primordially satisfying about walking into this:

and walking out an hour later with the floor and walls spotless, the broken tables whisked away, the bodies safely stored in your truck, and everything that wasn’t broken put back exactly where it belonged. There are some collectibles– every level has a few cassette tapes hidden away, and there are secret areas all over the place that you can uncover, and exploration is a lot of fun, especially once you unlock the– again, I’m not kidding– upgrade that lets you walk across blood without leaving footprints all over the goddamned place afterwards. You’ll need to find keys and the occasional key card, and oh, you’ll also rob everyone blind while you’re cleaning. The great thing about working for the mob is the people they send you after tend to have piles of cash and jewelry and stuff just sitting around! They’re all dead, they don’t need it any longer.

There’s no real point in talking about graphics or sound; they’re good enough and no better. The rag doll physics can occasionally be kinda ridiculous. You can jump or fall from any height and be fine; it’s impossible to die, so there were definitely times where I was moving a body and just chucked it off a balcony and then jumped after it rather than carrying it down the stairs. My only real gripe is that if you’re a completist, like me, and you want to 100% everything, every so often there’s a single bullet that you accidentally knocked somewhere with your mop that takes an hour to find, or a single spot of blood that you just missed that is too small for your UV lamps or your “Cleaner Vision” (no, seriously) to spot easily. Having to end a level at 99% blood cleanup because you just could not find that last spot is kinda annoying, especially when the game really does need about an hour to an hour and a half per level.

But yeah. This was a blast. Twelve hours or so was enough to 100% every level and get all but five of the achievements; I’m gonna jump back into finish those off just because I’m that guy. It’s on Game Pass right now, so if you have that, you don’t have to pay for it, but it’s worth the $20 or so you’d pay if you actually buy it.

Oh, and I vacuumed the whole house today, because I’d been cleaning in a video game for several days and felt kind of guilty about the condition of my actual house, which is a real place with cats in it that needs vacuuming way more often than I actually do it.

Summer Projects mode, maybe

On By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I am nothing if not encouraging.

I have spent all day thinking of Decluttering, which is kind of a ludicrous term for me to use under any circumstances, but especially under these: I need to get rid of a lot of my shit so that I have room for more shit. I do not at all intend to lead a life of acquiring less shit, which would be the more sensible approach to … well, everything. Most of my ideas for this summer involve either getting rid of shit or clearing any of half a dozen different backlogs of unread books, unplayed video games, TV shows and movies I want to watch, and unbuilt Lego sets. The biggest need around the house, other than cleaning and organizing, is to fix the fence in the back yard that the tree fell on, which my wife is convinced we can do on our own. She has to catch me in the right mood to do it, but that’s at least imaginable.

Part of me really wants to review the book I posted about yesterday, but I don’t think I’m going to. Those of you who figured out what it was (and I apologize for being coy, but sometimes I don’t want a pan to show up on a Google search) may possibly have remembered that I reviewed the first book in the series and did not mention constant terrible writing. I kind of want to pick it back up and reread a couple of chapters to see if it has the same writing problems and I just was able to ignore them for some reason. I am interested to see if it had a different editor than the first book. If so, there are two more books and some novellas, and I really hope he had the original editor for all of those. We’ll see.

Anybody have big plans for Memorial Day? We do not, which is what I want; I need to create some substitute assignments (as in, they substitute for assignments I can’t print, not “I’m planning on needing a substitute”) for Tuesday and Wednesday and finish grading about an inch of final exams, but that and eating a couple of brats pretty much sum up my plans for the day. Let me know if you’ve got anything cool going on.

Just a thought

On By Luther M. SilerIn life10 Comments

A warning: this post has the potential to start out sounding kind of grandiose, like I’ve got a Big Point to make and I’m Going Somewhere; don’t be fooled, this is just an anecdote that is a bit too complicated for Twitter or Mastodon. Calibrate your expectations accordingly.

My wife does the grocery shopping every week, on Saturday or Sunday morning. This started out as a Covid thing where it made more sense for just one of us to be out in the world being exposed to people and has more or less solidified into What We Do Around Here since then. While she’s gone, I clean up the kitchen and get the dishes washed. This involves emptying and refilling the dishwasher, which means I’m putting glasses and cups back into the cabinets.

How many of you put your glasses upside down in the cabinets? Is this something everyone does? An Indiana thing? I have no idea, because it’s not like I’ve paid attention in other people’s houses, and when I *am* in someone else’s house and getting a cup out of a cabinet, it’s likely that it’s someone related to me, so they have the same practices. I have no idea if this is “normal” or not.

Anyway, as I was putting a glass into the cabinet this morning, it floated through my head that the reason I have always done it this way is that it keeps bugs out of the glasses. That’s why you put them upside down. It’s so bugs can’t get in. That’s the reason.

And that thought kind of stopped me short for a minute. Like I literally froze, glass in hand, thinking about that belief that I’ve harbored, unexamined, for my whole Goddamn life.

Because you know what I’ve never had a problem with, not one time, in my entire life, from growing up in my parents’ house, to a couple of college dorms, to various apartments and now the whole-ass house I’ve lived in for the last twelve years? Bugs in cabinets. And one of those apartments had an ant problem for a while. I have probably at some point or another found a stinkbug in a cabinet. One. Because during stinkbug season those fuckers get everywhere. But that’s it. And this belief, that you keep glasses upside-down in the cabinet because that’s how you keep bugs out of them, has been hard-coded into me for my whole damn life.

Which got me wondering how many generations back you have to go, to find the ancestor who had cabinets and had a bug problem, one bad enough that decades later that person’s descendants are still automatically following this rule they– well, she, let’s be real– created. I know it came through my mother because when I was a kid mothers did all the housework, but my grandfather on Mom’s side had a lifelong, solid, post-WWII Silent Generation union job in a factory and if they were ever poor enough that keeping the bugs out was an issue I have never heard about it. So we’re talking probably at least three generations back.

It really makes me wonder what other things I do without thinking about it that can be traced back to, like, the Depression or something like that.

Basement update

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I’m not showing you pictures of the actual basement until it’s done, but this is what we did to our garage today:

If, uh, you happen to spot a wedding present in there, I promise it’s just the box. Really. Honest. My car is also completely full of cardboard– any cardboard still in this picture is going to get dropped off on Tuesday– because my son is attending something called Cardboard Camp for the next week, unless it gets cancelled because the roads between here and Hogwarts have melted. The one really bad bit of decision making here is that since we’ve filled the garage with stuff we’re going to get rid of in the garage sale we can’t put our cars in there, and as a result my car is going to have to be outside during the impending heat wave, which means if the boy’s camps aren’t cancelled for those two days transporting him there and back is gonna be super fun. I’m psyched about it. Honest.

Also, my knees hate me right now, and there’s still more work to be done downstairs. My wife and son hit the pool for the first time since we put it up after we were done working, but I didn’t because I didn’t trust myself on the ladder. Two days of too much up-and-down on stairs have got me hobbling more than I’m comfortable with at the moment, so I’m not going to put myself in a situation where I’m gonna land on my ass. I think I’ll be living there for most of the next few days, though.

No basement talk tomorrow; there are books to be reviewed!

Spring Cleaning

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

So, do you know what happens when you renovate a bathroom, and said bathroom backs onto your bedroom?

Okay, a lot of things; that question could have been a bit more specific. The biggest one, though? Dust. Oh, my God, so much fucking dust.

But the bathroom is oh so very nearly done, and what’s left to do isn’t going to generate any more dust, or at least isn’t going to generate any more dust that makes it into the bedroom.

So today I put all my laundry away, wen through my clothes for Goodwill donations, took all the boxes that came out of what used to be a closet and is now our shower and put everything back into its new location, dusted every Goddamn horizontal surface in the bedroom, dusted all the furniture, swept, vacuumed, moved most of the furniture (the bed will be a day all by itself, and I’m not touching the bookshelves) and vacuumed under that, then mopped probably 60% of the floor, with the 40% unmopped being the area under and around the bed.

Now it’s raining and the bedroom looks much better and I have game recording to do, I guess, because YouTube is still happening, so go subscribe.

The end.

PRODUCTIVITY!

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

I cleaned about half the house today, and in between vacuuming spent a pleasant hour out on the back porch enjoying the one (1) day of nice weather we’re going to get before Too Fucking Hot starts kicking in tomorrow. I will get the rest of it done tomorrow, along with finishing the week’s grading and driving over to my dad’s to give him a Covid haircut.

I also cooked breakfast, but I did that before the rest of the stuff. Turns out the boy likes omelets.

Tonight shall be spent finishing Season 5 of She-Ra, finishing my third playthrough of Nioh 2, and getting as far as I can into The Ten Thousand Doors of January before sleep.

Not a bad Saturday, as they go.

6:56 PM, Saturday May 23: 1,618,471 confirmed cases and 96,983 American deaths.

Nioh 2: Halfway Done Review

On By Luther M. SilerIn video gamesLeave a comment

I’m in the neighborhood of a third to halfway through my first playthrough of Nioh 2, and to a very real extent I don’t even need to write this review, as it doesn’t take long to say “Other than the inventory system the game is damn near perfect, and I’m used to the inventory system by now.” Like, that’s the review. Nioh is one of my favorite games of all time– it’s kind of amazing how many of those games I discovered during this console generation– and the sequel improves on the original in damn near every way, adding a ton of new enemies, a few new overlapping systems, a couple (not as many as I’d like, which might be my only complaint) of new weapons, and other than that just keeps everything rolling. The original game’s horrifying, punishing, kill-you-in-a-second-if-you-stop-paying-attention difficulty is still there, for sure, and the boss fights so far have been really satisfying. About half of them I’ve managed to pull off within a couple of attempts, and the other half have been those great kind of boss fights that start off with getting obliterated in seconds without laying a finger on anything and then you just keep learning patterns and getting better until you win. The fact that I don’t have to be back to work for five weeks and I still wish I had more time to play should tell you something. I suppose it’s always possible the back half could go repetitive and dull, but I doubt it; everything’s been amazing so far.

Finally getting around to wiping the hard drive on my old iMac– or, at least, I’m staring at it as it slowly reformats itself. The computer has been replaced long enough that the computer I replaced it with has been paid off, but is still sitting, forlorn, on my desktop waiting for me to do something with it so I can have it recycled. I need to get the office under control– my wife pointed out that there was a litterbox clearly visible in the background of one of my instructional videos the other day, and I actually started one of them with the words “Welcome to my filthy office!”

That’s gotta stop, and the first step to getting that done is reclaiming the desk so that I can take everything else that used to be on the desk and put it back, which will, along with some heavy decluttering, go a long way to making the room look a lot better. Again, I’m off for weeks. It’s not like I don’t have time.

It’s still fall break

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

… halfway through, or depending on how you choose to look at it the break part of fall break is over and I’m into the weekend. One way or another I’ve been reasonably successful at doing that thing I do where vacations are useless unless I get a lot of stuff done with them, as opposed to, say, relaxing, which I don’t really know how to do except in the context of basically monetizing it.

(I’m not being clear here. “Spend an hour reading” can be a perfectly cromulent way to “get stuff done,” provided that I intended to do a bunch of reading over the break. If “read a lot” isn’t on the list, it’s wasting time, not getting stuff done. There is no “relaxing.” If I can’t describe it, it doesn’t exist.)

Anyway. Point is, I finished the second-to-last, 660-page Throne of Glass book yesterday, leaving only the thousand-page monster that ends the series, and I’m taking a break to read something else in between Sarah Maas rodent-killers. I’ve been to both the dentist and the doctor. I beat my latest run of Dark Souls 2 and went back to Salt and Sanctuary, which didn’t catch on with me the first time I tried to play it and holy shit has it caught on on the second try. I have reclaimed the garage for my car, if not my wife’s; we’ve been parking in the driveway for far too long and we need to sell or toss a riding mower if we’re going to find a place for both cars in there again. I got one room in the house reasonably cleaned up and decluttered and I’m working on the office right now. Or at least I would be, if I wasn’t blogging, which still counts, because “blog every day” is definitely on the Shit to Do list.

But I got some decluttering done before I started blogging, so that counts. You can see the surface of a table in here that you haven’t been able to see for a while. Now if I can just get the floor cleaned up; it’s gross.

“Buy a feather duster” is on my list for this weekend, believe it or not. I don’t plan on feather dusting the floor, of course, but holy hell are the corners in the house getting troublesome. EDIT: Turns out we have a feather duster! I completely forgot about it, and found it just now while looking for the mop thingies for the “ReadyMop Mopping System” we have, which is basically just an oversized menstrual pad that can be rubbed on the floor. So I can dust tomorrow! Woo!

Yes, I just “Woo”‘ed dusting. I never said I was interesting. EDIT ENDS.

On the list for this weekend: my wife’s job has a family day/fun fair thing going on tomorrow, so we’re doing that; I have nothing at all to do for work, having quite sensibly prepared for next week before leaving on Wednesday. So the rest of the agenda is to get some shit going on Patreon, which has been languishing in October and is awfully close to becoming another free month. (I don’t charge my Patrons in months where I don’t feel like I’ve earned it. I don’t know that anyone would actually begrudge me the dollar or whatever they’re pledging, but it rubs me wrong.)

Oh: and the bathrooms. Gotta take care of the bathrooms, or at least the main one in the hallway. That’s Sunday sorted, right?

Sure.