Tag: collections

Here’s what I’ve got

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking1 Comment

I really ought to re-embrace the notion that I don’t have to post every single day, but I’m absurdly close to a year straight without missing a day and only, what, 2/3 of those have been bullshit? That’s a pretty good record, right? January and February have been exceptionally heinous, I know, but between being constantly sick and actually (don’t tell anyone) having a pretty damn good year at work, I’m both lower on good material than I normally am and less inclined to talk about it than I might be otherwise. The main things going on in my life right now are shit I actively don’t want to talk about here, which leaves book reviews and the occasional picture of a pile of fountain pens.

(The purple one on the right and the coffee-colored one in the middle are my current favorites. I am trying my best to not buy any more, because if I do, I’m going to start edging into more expensive ones. The most expensive pen there was $52. I caught myself eyeing one for five hundred dollars the other day and am uncomfortably close to pulling the trigger one that runs $150. I can’t do this.)

Anyway, speaking of video games (just pretend), I’ve been trying to put 9 Sols to bed but I’m completely stuck– I actually turned the difficulty down on a boss that I’m certain I could have beaten but I didn’t want to take the time, and now I can’t figure out where to go next. If I can’t figure it out tonight I’m gonna hit up a walkthrough. The game’s a lot of fun but I feel like it should have been a 25-hour game and right now I’m pushing 30 and I don’t know how much game there is left– at least two more bosses and who knows how much exploration. I have like four games on my PS5 I want to get to and another on the Xbox, believe it or not, and I can’t play any of them until I beat this one.

#REVIEW: The Neurodiversiverse: Alien Encounters; Anthony Francis & Liz Olmstead, eds.

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

And now the third review in a row of a book I got sent as a free ARC, thus discharging all of my current review obligations. I feel kind of bad about how long it took me to get to this; I didn’t get a release date when they sent me the book, and I put it on a sort of mental “find out when this is coming out” list, only to discover it had already been released when they sent it to me. So this is not timely; my apologies.

This is a hell of a concept for an anthology, really; the back cover describes it as “a hopeful, empowering science fiction anthology filled with own-voices stories from neurodivergent creators”– in other words, stories about neurodivergent people encountering aliens, written by people who are themselves neurodivergent but presumably have not encountered aliens. I find the word “neurodiversiverse” immensely fun to say, and while anthologies aren’t always my thing, there are certainly some gems to be found in here. Cat Rambo’s Scary Monsters, Super Creeps is about a young woman with an anxiety disorder who discovers it gives her superpowers, and Ada Hoffman’s Music, Not Words is about an autistic girl who is the first contact for an alien race.

Most of the authors in the collection are people I’m not familiar with, though; I sort of jumped around rather than reading the collection straight through (how do people usually read anthologies? Is that weird?) and Lauren D. Fulter’s The Cow Test is probably the standout of the rest of the anthology, for me at least. It involves cows. It’s a short story, I’m not spoiling the details. 🙂 There are art pieces and poetry as well. Some of the aspects of neurodivergence that get explored here are really interesting; Jody Lynn Nye’s A Hint of Color is about synesthesia, for example, and Keiko O’Leary’s Close Encounter In the Public Bathroom is the only poem I’ve ever read that combines being about OCD and aliens.

No, seriously, this anthology made me recommend a poem. That’s worth picking up, right?

Nerd project!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek5 Comments

Yesterday, I had too many dice.

Today, I have too many dice and they are displayed on my wall in what is technically two nail polish racks, but who’s counting? Not me.

There is room for more, which is good, because I still have about seven or eight sets of dice that need to be displayed.

It is difficult to put into words just how happy this stupid little project has made me. My office is so much nerdier now.

A review of an actual book

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Reviews3 Comments

I’m a hundred percent certain I’ve talked about this before: my wife and I both love to read. I read a lot faster than she does, but we have fairly similar tastes in reading material for the most part, so she only very rarely actually buys books. Generally once she finishes something she’ll ask me what I’ve read recently that she’ll want to read, or just go looking through the bookshelves that are slowly taking over our entire house until something strikes her fancy, and then she’ll read that.

There is a critical difference between the two of us here, because while we are both readers, I am also a book collector and my wife very much is not. She has very gently suggested to me a couple of times that we might possibly have too many books. I do not recognize that as a legitimate state of existence. “Too many books” is, for me, quite simply not a thing.

Which brings me to a little dilemma I’m having with James Islington’s The Shadow of What Was Lost.

I don’t like the story. I am not enjoying reading this book. The reasons aren’t especially interesting and fall into my Don’t Shit on Books Unnecessarily policy; I’m just not enjoying it very much, 200 or so pages into its 700 or so page length, with two more volumes already concluding the trilogy that are available but I haven’t bought.

The problem is the actual book— not the story, not the part you’re supposed to, like, look at, but the actual physical object itself that you hold in your hands– is amazing, at least in the paperback edition. The pages and especially the cover just feel great, and the book is exactly the right size, and it even smells good, and I know from seeing them in bookstores that the entire trilogy looks great on a shelf. So much so, as a matter of fact, that I’m considering going ahead and ordering the rest of the series just so that I can touch them and so that they can be on my bookshelves together, effectively as art pieces and not as things that convey a story. I mean, would I ever read them? Will I even finish this one, or will I DNF it and move on to something I’ll enjoy reading more? Or will I just keep reading it so I can hold it for longer, because it’s so pleasant to have in the hand?

This is … not a thing my wife understands. As marital incompatibilities go, I’ll take it, believe me, but if I end up ordering the next couple of books I might have to find a way to put them somewhere she won’t find them. Not quite sure how that’s gonna work, but we’ll see what I can come up with.

Meet Gideon

On By Luther M. SilerIn life11 Comments

She’s been seen by a vet and more or less given a clean bill of health; she’s had an upset tummy for basically the whole time we’ve had her, so she’s got an antibiotic and they gave her a dewormer just for safety’s sake, but she’s negative for All the Scary Things and otherwise seems to be doing fine, so we’ve been slowly and carefully introducing her to the other cats this weekend. Jonesy appears to be fine with her so long as she’s not trying to eat his tail, which is about 60% of the time, and Sushi … well, Sushi is going to take a little bit longer to adjust, I think. 🙂

Why Gideon? It was my wife’s idea, providing a pleasing symmetry since I named Jonesy and the boy named Sushi; she’s named after the Gideon in Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth. The name is perhaps a bit overly grand at this point in her life (although “Giddykitty” and “Giddygirl” both roll off the tongue quite nicely) but I think she’ll grow into it. Reasons it works:

  • I feel like her Halloween colors insist on a spooky name. Gideon is a necromancer. Check.
  • Gideon is also a redhead. Check.
  • Gideon spends the entirety of her book wearing skull face paint. That prominent blaze on her face doesn’t really resemble a skull at all, but I feel like connecting a cat with prominent facial markings and a character who wears face paint works. Check.

In other news, my memory is clearly going and I’ll be a shell of a man in a couple of years. I have nearly a thousand books on my Goodreads “read” shelf, which I’ve only been maintaining since 2016, so estimating that I own in the neighborhood of 2500-3000 or so books is probably not an exaggeration. I need you to understand that I’m also not exaggerating when I tell you I can find most of them in no time at all. Like, I know what books I have and I know where they are. This is not something I screw up.

It was pointed out to me recently that Brandon Sanderson is from Utah, which is a state that I don’t have an author from yet. I used to be a big fan of Sanderson’s, but at some point I grew weary of him, and I haven’t read any of his books in forever, but I figured since the guy writes 20 books a year finding something new wouldn’t be that hard. The boy wanted to go to Barnes and Noble today, so I figured I’d just grab something. I even had a book in mind; he wrote a sequel trilogy to his Mistborn series some time ago and I never read it just because it came out after I’d entered my Over Sanderson period.

(To be clear, I don’t have anything really negative to say about the guy; I don’t have any evidence that he’s, like, a bad person or anything, but his books started getting really samey after a while and I bailed on him after noticing the serious problem with white savior complex that his Stormlight Archives series had. It’s not like a personal vendetta or anything.)

Anyway, I found the first book of the second Mistborn series, called The Alloy of Law, and grabbed a Jorge Luis Borges book (Argentina!) along with it for shits and giggles.

On the way out of the store, my wife says “Don’t you have that one already?” to me.

“No,” I said, “I never picked up the second series.” And then I proceeded to torture myself about it the entire way home. Whereupon I found out that I did have the damn thing already, and not even in a different edition that would have given me an excuse. I hadn’t finished the series, but I had started it. And, y’all, I don’t make that mistake, and I’m vastly irritated with myself.

I mean, I know it’s a solvable problem, because I just go back and swap it for another book, but … shit.

In which The Great Rearranging may be upon us

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading2 Comments

It is not outside the realm of possibility that I have too many books. I know, it’s unlikely, and I’m not 100% sure that “too many books” is actually a thing, but it’s possible. What is definitely true is that I don’t have enough room to arrange the books that I have properly.

I am currently faced with a week off from work, and because I am an American I am viewing this less as an opportunity to relax and more as an opportunity to “get things done,” because the possibility of going a week without working or “accomplishing things” is just beyond my ability to comprehend. And I find myself casting an eye upon these bookshelves, and their current state of overpopulation, and thinking about opportunities to give myself a job that I can complete half of and then ignore for a year.

If you look at the top shelf of the middle bookshelf there (the top shelf, not the books stacked on top of the bookshelf) you will get an idea of what I’m thinking, because I rearranged that one as a test. I’m wondering what I can do if I shift to mostly vertical stacking on the bookshelves, especially the books that are currently perched on top of the shelves themselves. In theory, so long as the shelves themselves hold up, I can stack those clear to the ceiling– and if I use only completed series for them, which I’m also thinking about, I can put things up there that aren’t going to be rearranged all that much.

Understand that that is only the top half of less than half of just the bookshelves that are against that one wall alone, if you want to understand the magnitude of this job I’m contemplating.

I dunno. If I think about it long enough, I can switch over to stressing about how I had a whole week to get it done and didn’t do it. That won’t be especially mentally healthy, but it would certainly be less work.

In which I get rid of my childhood, and my teenage years, and my adulthood, and my middle age, and then almost die

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

unnamed.jpgI’ve been collecting comic books since I was nine, and with the exception of a couple of years when I was living in Chicago without a car and no real access to a comic shop I’ve never really stopped.  It’s probably safe to say that at 40 I’m spending more money on comics than I ever have, actually, due to a combination of disposable income, comics being generally really good right now, and the effect of inflation on the prices of the books themselves.

Hogwarts is having what amounts to a building-wide garage sale next weekend.  I just donated about 3500 comics– somewhere around half of my collection, pictured there to the right.  This is, I’m pretty sure, the first time I’ve divested myself of any substantial portion of my collection.  I spent most of this morning going through those boxes and pulling out anything that I thought might damage tiny little private-school brains, or at least anything that the wealthy parents of those tiny little private-school brains might think would damage them.

I really like comic books, but they’re really heavy and they take up a ton of room.  I figure I’ve bought myself another decade before I have to purge the collection again.  I did warn the nice lady who came by to pick them up to not expect to make a mint from them and that selling them for a dime or a quarter apiece might be a good idea just to ensure they move; we’ll see what happens.  I may go to the sale just to see what happens or I may not; I feel like both seeing my comics get sold off to other people or seeing them sit there alone and unacknowledged might be depressing, so I probably won’t go.

But hey.  There’s a lot of space cleared out in the office now.  That’s good, right?

In other news, knowing a stranger was coming to my house to help me load up the boxes, I tried to attack the patch of vines near my front door that has overgrown our steps and walkway.  We’ve neglected it lately because the mosquitoes are so bad, and it’s gone from “unattractive” to “genuinely sort of embarrassing” lately, but I figured that we’ve had some cool mornings recently and I can go outside in general without feeling like I’m under attack and so it would probably be safe to take the, oh, fifteen minutes it would take to trim the things back, rake them up, and toss the remnants into a garbage can.

Ha.

shannon-sweet-among-mosquitos-.jpg

In general I’m not frightened of bugs.  I avoid bees and wasps, of course, because they’re assholes, but I’ve never been stung.  Spiders squick me a bit from time to time, I admit it, but I try not to let it affect my behavior.  So when I tell you I had to run away from the patch of greenery in front of my house, flailing my arms around and swatting at my body like– hell, like a guy fucking covered in a swarm of mutant mosquitoes, I suppose, the situation kind of defeats simile– you need to understand that it is not a typical reaction to bugs.  And the fucking things chased me.  They followed me to the foot of the driveway and then stood guard outside my goddamned garage door and I had to fight through another cloud of them to get back inside.

That patch of vines can go to hell, is what I’m saying.  It can take over the whole front of the house for all I care.  I come in through the damn garage anyway.

I’d part with my childhood but no one wants it

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading11 Comments

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Semi-serious question: anybody wanna buy about four or five thousand comic books?

I’ve been collecting comic books since I was nine years old.  Never once in that time have I actually gotten rid of any, and I’m finally hitting the point lately where I really don’t think that my current collection is going to be sustainable for much longer.  Mind you, this is not an “I want to stop buying comic books” post– I don’t.  I just don’t feel like I need to have all the ones that I currently have for any longer.  I’ll probably end up holding on to maybe fifteen to twenty percent of my collection out of sentimental or story value, but most of what’s left I feel like I can get rid of fairly painlessly.

The problem is I don’t want to just throw them away, and any other method of getting rid of comic books doesn’t actually work very well.  There’s basically no market in back issue comics any longer– search Ebay for “comic book lots” and you’re going to get a wasteland, although I can’t really believe Ebay is still in business anyway, so maybe that’s not worth much as a data point– and for the most part I don’t have any books that have massively inflated values over whatever their cover price is anyway.  My local comic shop doesn’t want them, at least partially because for the last seven years they sold them to me, and they certainly don’t want them back.  Libraries won’t deal with comics, and at that point I sort of run out of ideas.  Pawn shops?  I kinda doubt it.  Secondhand places?  The nostalgia store in the mall?  I’d be surprised.

What’s triggering this is that if I want to keep my collection in any sort of reasonable shape I need to go through and rebox everything about once a year or so.  Now, I can just buy new boxes as I go and toss shit into them, but that means that if I ever actually want to find anything ever again it would take eons.  I have sixteen longboxes and three shortboxes– so call it seventeen longboxes– of comic books; a longbox holds about three hundred books, give or take.

(Just did the math.  The first sentence of this post originally said “three thousand.”  Gah.)

Anyway, if I want them to be in any kind of order where I can actually find them again, about once a year I have to buy a couple of new boxes and then spend a day or two interfiling all the stuff I’ve bought over the course of the past year into the collection– which is complicated as hell, because there’s never remotely enough room in the boxes I have, and I have to sort of start from one end and work my way back, moving every single comic I own at least once while I’m putting the new stuff in with the older books.  It’s a bloody obnoxious mess and it becomes more obnoxious every year.  And judging from the two four-inch-high stacks on my desk and the three full shortboxes next to me, I need to do it again like right now if I don’t want to be buried in these things– and I really don’t want to be buried in these things.

I should stash them all in the basement and not worry about it, but I’m worried that if I do that it would trigger an immediate basement flood– it’s too humid down there for comic books as is– and I’d rather throw them away then lose them in some sort of home disaster.  Which is probably kinda stupid but whatever, that’s how my brain works.

So, yeah.  Anybody planning on opening a comic book store and want some quick back-issue stuff?  Hit me up.  Or just come over and steal a bunch of them.  If you can get past the dogs you can have them.

Just leave me my Iron Man books.  Those, I’m never giving up.