Okay, look, Marvel …

On June 25, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, moviesLeave a comment

You’ve got me, you bastards. I’m in. The last of your fucking movies I saw in a theater was I don’t even remember but it might have been Endgame, weeks after it came out. I also don’t remember which of your movies was the last I saw at all. Maybe Black Widow.

I am going to see Fantastic Four: First Steps in a theater. I am not back and I have no plans to see any other forthcoming Marvel movies. I’m gonna see Superman, but that’s not you. That’s two superhero movies in a month which will be more than I’ve seen in the last several years.

Please don’t fuck this up.

Anybody know anything about flies? We have a mystery infestation in about a room and a half in the house. Our dining room has a big glass sliding door leading to a screened-in back porch. I have killed, and I swear I’m not shitting you, well over a hundred house flies crawling around on that screen door in the last two days. Well over a hundred of them. I have absolutely no idea where they’re coming from. There is no obvious source of flies in my dining room. There is a vent right in front of the sliding door; I have pulled the grille out of it and vacuumed inside it extensively, and it’s not big enough to be hiding a dead animal or something, plus if there was something in there we’d be able to smell it. Plus, if they were coming from the vents, they’d be in every room in the house, not concentrated by the back porch.

They are not on the outside of the sliding doors. Plus, again, there’s no source of flies out there and it’s screened in. They have to be coming from inside the house and they also have to be coming from somewhere very close to that sliding door, and there just isn’t anything. Flies don’t just spontaneously generate! That would mean that there’s something in my dining room that is rotting and was covered in maggots and zero of the four humans and three cats in the house noticed it?

I’ve sat and watched and waited to see if I could spot them crawling from somewhere, and of course, because they’re flies and flies have turning invisible as a class ability, I’ve had no luck on that. If I leave the room for half an hour there will be between five and seventeen (the current record) on the sliding door when I come back. I’ve been using the vacuum cleaner to kill them because it’s faster and more effective than a Goddamn flyswatter.

Somebody help me out, this is gross and I’m tired of it.

(Oh, and I made a flytrap with a Sprite bottle, some apple cider vinegar and a few drops of dish soap because the Internet told me it was an effective cheap flytrap. Pff. It has not caught a single fucking fly. There’s an indoor zapper coming Friday.)

Cross your fingers for me

On July 24, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Work1 Comment

Or light a candle, or talk to Jesus, or whatever it is you do. I’m not going to say why and honestly I feel like I’ll know whether I got any supernatural assistance within a day or two. Just help me out if you get a minute, OK? Thanks.

(No, this is not lottery related, although I suppose it could be.)

In which I require the internet

On October 24, 2015October 24, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories5 Comments

Calm_890c76_254933 Longshot here, as Google has already failed me, so I need somebody who reads as much as I do, but has a better memory.

I’m trying to track down a short story. I suspect it’s been at least a decade since I’ve read it and considerably longer is entirely possible. It may have been as long as a novella, but I’m thinking no more than 5-6000 words.

The basic premise, to the best of my memory, was that a wizard’s power was in some way connected to being able to keep something secret. Every magic user had a secret of some kind, and if someone else found your secret, something bad would or at least could happen. I don’t recall the details. Anyway, that was the scenario, and the big twist at the end of the story was a wizard using an illusion spell to convince a woman (who may herself have been a wizard, or may simply have been a spy for one) that she’d spent the night in a torrid lovemaking session with him.

His secret was that he was a woman, you see. That was the big twist at the end. One presumes that the torrid lovemaking session involved some illusionary man-penis, but I don’t remember the story being quite that explicit.

My best theory is that I read this in Dragon magazine at some point, which means that it probably came out in the late eighties or early nineties, but again it could have been later than that. I never really did a lot of reading of short stories, so that’s not too awful a guess, but if I’m wrong I’m completely out of ideas.

Anybody remember this? I’ll send you an autographed copy of the Luther Siler book of your choice if you can figure out what the story was called and where to find it.

(EDIT: Holy hell, Little Red Pen found it:

A #Scrivener help beg

On August 30, 2015August 30, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing6 Comments

The internet isn’t cooperating. I love the hell out of Scrivener’s Compile feature, especially the way it builds the Table of Contents for me without me having to carefully hyperlink everything. But:

Does anyone know how to prevent it from actually adding the “Chapter Seventy” part in front of the chapter title? Because it’s doing that throughout and I’d prefer that it not do that. I’ve been fiddling and haven’t figured out what the problem is yet.

(EDIT: Figured it out, naturally. Leaving the post up so you can get a gander at some chapter titles.)