You didn’t do your homework: On Music

On February 26, 2017February 26, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Music5 Comments

I told you yesterday to listen to a song. Scroll down and do that right now. Or just click; that gets me more hits.

Kurt would have turned 50 this week, by the way. This post isn’t about Nirvana’s music but it’s not unrelated, as you’ll soon figure out.

Anyway: a few months ago I wrote a post about Rae Sremmurd where I talked about my utter inability to actually pay attention (or, honestly, understand) any of the lyrics to their songs. I continue to listen to Sremmlife 2 more or less weekly and other than Black Beatles I can’t actually name any of the songs or quote any of the lyrics. This is in stark opposition to the way I used to enjoy music, which was to memorize every syllable of entire albums. I don’t know what the hell Swae Lee and Slim Jxmmi are talking about in the majority of the thing, and I had to look up their names just now.

But I love the hell out of Sremmlife 2 anyway.

The other day I downloaded Future’s self-titled new release on the strength of the cover art. I do that sometimes; I like discovering new music and occasionally I just buy something for the sheer hell of it.

(Sidenote: upon finding that link, I discover that dude has a second new album, meaning he has two new releases within two weeks. I buy it instantly.)

(Are we still calling these “albums”? I can’t use CD anymore, but “album” still seems to work. Anyway.)

So here’s the thing: I was listening to Future on the way home from work last night, and if anything to my old-ass ears the lyrics are even harder to decipher than Sremmurd. This seems to be a Southern hiphop thing; Sremmurd is from Tupelo and Future is from Atlanta. I put the YouTube “video” of POA on the post yesterday because that’s the song that was playing when I realized I wasn’t really in the car anymore, and upon checking the track realized I had not the slightest idea what POA might stand for. (“Power of Attorney,” according to the Google.) And this leads me to my question, and the reason I’m writing this post in the first place:

How important are lyrics to you to be able to enjoy a piece of music? Do you ever listen to music in a foreign language where there’s literally no chance of you understanding the words? Is it possible for a “good song” to be about a subject or topic you hate? I once tossed a brand-new CD out the window of my car on the first listen because it turned out to be laced with homophobia, but it was also clear and understandable. And I can’t stand a couple of very popular songs because of what they’re about.

These last couple of albums could be about goddamn anything and I don’t care at the moment because I can’t stop zoning out when I’m listening to them. Which isn’t a bad thing; I can’t complain. I’m just wondering how weird it is.

PS: I got home last night and went to check the mail, and stopped dead in my driveway because I could hear Rae Sremmurd playing and thought my phone had unpaused itself or something. It took a moment to realize that one of the two teenagers next door had their bedroom window open and was listening to Sremmlife 2 at perhaps an unhealthy volume level. So there’s that.

Homework for tomorrow

On February 25, 2017February 25, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn Music3 Comments

An hour and a half before closing tonight, every toilet in the building overflowed at once. I didn’t think that was a thing that could happen.

I’m exhausted. Your homework is to watch this video (okay, it’s a still. Listen to the song, then,) and I’ll talk about it tomorrow.

THE FARTENING: In which I destroy my body for SCIENCE!: Prologue

On January 1, 2015December 31, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Cooking18 Comments

It is 2015 and the future. Time to ruin my body with experimental food!

Have you heard of Soylent? I ordered a week’s supply in July, partially because I was genuinely curious about it and partially because I am a glutton for punishment and thought it might make for a hilarious series of posts for the blog.

Let me say that again: July. My Soylent arrived yesterday. They are backlogged like a sumbitch in supplying new orders, although the website claims that reorders will ship within a week or two. At the moment, I don’t actually plan to re-up, but we’ll see what happens. Today you get the unboxing and some theories on when I’m going to actually eat this. I’m thinking about starting next Friday, because I’ll be out of town all weekend and… well, there’s a reason I’m calling the series THE FARTENING– users have reported some minor issues with adjusting to a Soylent diet. The first taste may have to wait a little bit. We’ll see.

Your Soylent arrives as two boxes inside of a bigger box. Exciting! There is no packaging foam or other nonsense inside; luckily, nothing is especially breakable.

The two boxes inside the box. One contains the actual Soylent products, the other is my customized pitcher that came FREE! with my eighty-five dolla worth of powder and oil.

Everything inside both of the containers. The boy was super excited by this entire process and wanted to touch everything; I’m amazed that I kept him out of all of the pictures. A day’s worth of Soylent fits in the pitcher; that’s all I’m supposed to eat for the entire day. In three separate meals. This is going to be interesting.

At any rate: one pitcher, one scoop, seven bottles of oil, seven packages of Soylent, one information card, one instruction booklet.

The Official Soylent Scoop is actually pretty well-made (so is the pitcher, for that matter) and supposedly gives the proper dimensions for a single serving of the stuff. I might indulge in one serving tomorrow just out of curiosity; we’ll see. I also need to check and see if this is any sort of standard measurement because it really is a nicely-made measuring cup.

A close-up of one package of Soylent. One package is three meals; supposedly a day’s worth of food. One of the decisions I need to make is whether I’m going to try and go whole-hog on this stuff or just eat it during the day at work and then have a regular dinner; the first makes more sense as SCIENCE! and is definitely going to be better for the blog (you guys are never happier than when I’m miserable) but the second would fit into my life better. We’ll see; I’ve got time to think about it.

A closeup of the oil bottle. Soylent is 100% vegan, by the way.

Man, it really is the future. Food comes with instructions now! This thing’s like fourteen pages long!
Can I point out that the “L” in the “Release notes” font is terrible and drives me crazy? I can? Good.

More later, as I decide exactly how this is going to work.

The most important thing you’re going to read all day

On July 9, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

JellyBellyBeans Let’s talk about jelly beans.

You may recall from a couple of days ago that we just coated the tub surround in RedGard. This is a waterproofing membrane; it goes on like paint although it has a slightly thicker consistency, and dries to a rubbery membrane. It’s supposed to be put on at a certain thickness to be effective; we lack the tool (a wet film thickness gauge) to properly determine how thick the RedGard is going on the wall and thus have been using “paint it until you can’t see the words anymore” as a handy Internet-suggested shorthand.

Six fuckin’ coats of this Pepto-Bismol lookin’ shit later, I’m ready to say fuck what the internet thinks and that this has got to be thick enough by now. Take a look at the size of the bucket in the middle picture, here. That bucket’s almost empty and every bit of that shit’s on the walls right now. The tub’s not that goddamn big; hell, I’ll do the math if I need to to figure out how thick it probably is.

(Hmm. Maybe I should just do the math…)

(Just not right now.)

Anyway. Jellybeans. There’s an Ace Hardware near our house; we tend to try and frequent them whenever we have any sort of tool/hardware/home improvement needs because hey, local business, and also because they tend to have employees who know what the hell they’re talking about and are nice about finding out if they don’t know.

We’ve had to go to Ace a lot lately because this stuff is waterproofing material and thus doesn’t really do being rinsed out of brushes very well. And we keep having to add surprise coats, thus two or three trips to Ace in just a few days to buy more brushes and rollers.

Our local Ace Hardware keeps a giant rack of Jelly Belly Jelly Beans right by the cash register.

They are demons, Ace Hardware. Demons, I tell you. Because the Jelly Bellies… I cannot resist them. And so every trip I have made to Ace Hardware for the last several days has led to me scarfing a bag of jelly beans on the way home, because why the hell would I try and wait until I was actually home? Who does that?

Anyway, on the way home on the most recent trip it hit me that jelly beans are really the perfect food of the future. I don’t know what kind of Nazi-inspired demon-magic taste thaumaturgy goes into these fuckers, but any time you hand me a little nugget of gelatin small enough to fit in my nose and I eat it and I can taste every individual element of the best cheeseburger I’ve ever had in my life, you have either solved all of the world’s problems or doomed it; I’m not sure which.

Next task is to figure out how to pack a day’s worth of nutrition into one of these little bastards and once you do that I swear I’ll never eat anything else ever again, I promise. Food pill, Jelly Belly people. Get on that.

On personal finance

On January 17, 2014January 17, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Politics4 Comments

WARNING: Ill-informed rant ahead. More so than usual, yes.

Shut up.

I got another quarterly statement from MetLife today. I have something called a 401A. I phrase it that way not because I’m trying to be cute or lead into an explanation but because I really don’t have the vaguest idea what the shit a 401A actually is. I know it has something to do with retirement and I know that it is pathetically small; I’ve supposedly been paying into this thing (or maybe someone else pays into it, I dunno) for, what, seven years now?– something like that, and the total amount in the account is still less than the amount of a single paycheck. They helpfully inform me that I can look forward to a monthly retirement income of $64 (that’s not a typo) based on what I have in my account.

I have some other account with some other company; it has even less money in it. I think I started paying into that in Chicago, maybe, and then I left that job but I still have the account? I should probably “roll it over” into something; I hear that money can be “rolled over” in some circumstances and I think maybe this might have something to do with that.

And then there’s my TRF, or Teacher’s Retirement Fund. Off the top of my head I have no idea how much is in that or what it’s good for, but if I’ve gotten my quarterly report from MetLife I’m probably due to get a statement from them soon too.

That, right there, constitutes the entire sum of both my knowledge of how investments work and the current state of my “retirement fund.” I just actually tried– I think about this every time I get a quarterly statement, but this time I actually did something about it– to log into MetLife’s website to see if I have the option to be “more aggressive” (that’s a money thing, right?) with how they’re allocating my money, because the $8 that my fund increased in value over the last quarter seems… paltry.

The site is insisting that I give them my PIN. I don’t have a PIN, or at least I don’t think I do; I’m certain I’ve never logged into the website before. I clicked the button helpfully labeled “Lost your PIN?” and they have informed me that they’re mailing it to me. Because it is 1986.

Here’s the thing: I know, intellectually, that I probably ought to care about and be paying close attention to this stuff. I also know politically that my generation is not going to be allowed to retire. That’s an illusion; retirement is basically done as a concept in American society for anyone under 40. That TRF money? I’ll eat my own dick if that’s still available to me in any meaningful form when I’m 65, or 70, or whatever age they think I ought to be working to by the time I supposedly get to be that old. That shit’s gonna be stolen, no doubt by some rich ratfucker who deserves it more than I do. It’s funny money; I don’t believe for a second that it’s actually real or that it will ever actually make its way to me. I don’t particularly trust the 401A either, for much the same reasons.

I’d like to increase the amount that is getting put into this 401A plan (the corp is kicking in a contribution– at least, I’m pretty sure this money is coming from them, not me– but I’m pretty sure I can tell payroll to pull more out for it if I want) but the state legislature has made it their goal over the last several years to make sure that no teacher in Indiana ever gets a raise again, and so it’s not like there’s extra money becoming available that I could dedicate to investments.

I think I’ll go buy some lottery tickets. Or– ooh! A Bitcoin!