The tree has lights but no real ornaments (the boy hung some toys on it) and the vacuum is right next to it, plugged in. If the kitten touches the tree, we turn on the vacuum.
Works really well.
Tag: holidays
#Weekendcoffeeshare: Sweatpants Edition
If we were having coffee, you’d either be in my house or witness to just about the first time I’ve left my house since getting home from my dentist appointment on Wednesday. This, if you’re me, constitutes a certain type of pure bliss, and it has been a lovely, wonderful long weekend, one where I have mostly not been wearing pants and yesterday I did not bother to shower until just before bed.
Let’s talk geek shit, then, because at the moment it’s what I’ve got. Again, I haven’t left the house in a few days.
ITEM THE FIRST! I abandoned a book this morning, R.E. Stearns’ Barbary Station, when it became clear that despite starting off with an absolutely scandalous amount of potential the writing was never going to click for me. This book is about a duo of lesbian engineers who steal a colony ship and present it to a gang of space pirates, hoping that the gift will get them into the gang, because the galactic economy has gone to shit and “find a job with a pirate crew” is, under the circumstances, a sound plan. They then discover that the pirates living on the station are sort of trapped there, because the AI running the place has gone rogue and has decided Kill All Humans is the right way to deal with things.
I mean, come on. I can’t resist a single thing about that premise. This was bought the second I knew it existed.
One of them is a hacker, and hacking is presented as this drug-induced, hallucinatory metaphor-space, and the idea is fascinating. In fact, damn near all of the ideas in the book are fascinating. Everything about it is fascinating. What it isn’t is good, unfortunately. The writing is clumsy at best and the book is at least one solid editing pass and a new draft away from being a good read. I don’t normally like to slag on books I didn’t like here, especially if they didn’t piss me off in an entertaining way, but part of me kind of hopes that someone will read the premise and decide I suck at deciding if things are good and buy the book anyway. I need R. E. Stearns to sit down with a really good editor for her next book, and then to reissue this one. Major disappointment.
(I’m not alone in this assessment. The book currently has the worst overall star average of the nearly 600 books I’ve reviewed on Goodreads– only 3.19/5. It’s tied with a Chuck Wendig book that was the victim of a prolonged and stupid review bombing. That’s bad.)
Also, the font the book is written in is borderline unreadable. I thought I’d get used to it but it was still pushing me out of getting lost in the book before I bailed. With a better-written story, it might not have mattered, but with a poorly-written one, it was just One More Thing.
That was unpleasant, so let’s talk about ITEM THE SECOND! which is Red Dead Redemption 2. I actually took that picture by pointing my camera at my TV, because I got to the top of that mountain and looked off over the edge and thought Jesus, when I started playing video games, I was playing Asteroids, and now this. Because you can go anywhere you can see in that picture.
I will have a lot more to say about this game later, believe me, but for right now I just want to bask in how outstandingly beautiful the game is, and how it got me to spend a couple of hours this afternoon not bothering to advance the story at all but just exploring and hunting, which is kind of a ridiculous way to spend your Sunday before going back to work. There are things I don’t like– the control scheme it starts you with is terrible, and once you fix the terrible control scheme you’re still left with something that will lead to you occasionally firing a gun in a crowded tavern by accident or punching your horse. Both of those activities are kinda frowned upon.
I’ve done more geekery this weekend, but the one other thing I wanna talk about is going to get its own post, I think. So … wanna go hunt moose with me? Because I kinda want to bag a moose today.
My Patreon promotion is still running through bedtime tomorrow, or maybe even longer than that if I decide I feel like it. Subscribe at the $2/month level or above and I’ll send you an autographed, print copy of my newest novel, Click.
Luther Siler Black Friday deals!
Ha! There are no Black Friday deals! My books are cheap. Everything is between $0.99 and $5! Go save money on an e-reader and then fill it up with some awesome new books:
- The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 1
- The Sanctum of the Sphere: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 2
- Tales: The Benevolence Archives, Vol. 3
- Skylights
- Searching for Malumba
- Balremesh and other stories
You also have the option of joining my Patreon, which gets you Click at the $2/month level and beyond.
Happy shopping!
In which it is finished and so am I
I’m fortunate in that I don’t actually have a crazy racist uncle to avoid sitting next to at Thanksgiving. I have four uncles– or, at least, I have four blood uncles, not counting various men my aunts are married to, and of the four I have perhaps one and a half relationships with them. None of them to my knowledge are racist. “Crazy” is kind of ableist and well okay one of my uncles could very well be schizophrenic but I’m still not about to use that word to describe him.
The point is, whatever issues I might have with Thanksgiving, I don’t particularly have any family members I need to avoid, because it’s pretty much the same eight to twelve people at every Thanksgiving dinner and none of them are going to cause trouble. I snapped at my mother-in-law once during a family meal a couple of years ago but I don’t think it was Thanksgiving, and also she’s not alive any longer so it’s unlikely to repeat itself. Nah, any trouble I have with this holiday is found squarely within 1) my intense dislike of false piety (You Will Be Thankful For Stuff On This Specific Day kinda gets on my nerves) and 2) my general desire to, like, never do stuff. I love my family, y’all, but three people live in this house and any time that number goes up by much more than 100% I’m gonna get twitchy no matter how much I like them.
At any rate, wherever you are, I hope you didn’t have to fight with anyone today, and I hope if you did, at least the food was worth it. I’m gonna spend the rest of the night watching She-Ra on Netflix and playing Red Dead Redemption 2.
(Next year, I’m making macaroni and cheese, by the way.)
I’m just gonna rebrand the blog now
INFINITEFREETIME NO LONGER. This blog is now called InfinitecomplaintsaboutAmazon.
Nah, not really. But in the midst of all this nonsense about the goddamn books we ordered some boots and shoes for the boy, because apparently November is just too ridiculously late to do something crazy like walk into a store and buy boots.
(I feel less sorry for brick and mortar retail every time some shit like this happens. It’s November. We haven’t had real snow yet. Leave some fucking boots on the shelves, you jackasses.)
Right, I forgot to complain about Amazon. So, we couldn’t find boots at the shoe store nearest to our house, or the Target nearest to that shoe store, so we ordered him a pair of boots and a pair of new shoes, because why not do both at the same time and OH HEY you missed out on that sale too. The boots got here the other day; all good.
The shoes got here today. Now, this was one of those “fulfilled by Amazon” things, so Amazon isn’t directly responsible for this, but I opened the box and there was still a fucking ink tag on one of the shoes.
Come the fuck on, guys. I have a dentist appointment tomorrow, and my appointment is near an actual Dick’s, so I’m gonna just swing by there with all my receipts and everything and see if they will remove the tag for me. Alternately, we’ll just cut the fucking laces off and buy new ones. I don’t have the damn energy to deal with a return right now.
(Wonders how effectively the internet can help with removing the tag.)
Anyway. The image up there isn’t there for any reason other than that I’m listening to Shimmy Shimmy Ya right now. I am officially on Thanksgiving vacation, meaning that I don’t even have to think about any children other than the one that lives in my house for the next several days. Virtual hunting is about to get way more important to my lifestyle than it used to be. It turns out we’re not leaving town like we thought we were, so we’re hosting Thanksgiving, but we’re gonna keep shit simple. The other four days of the weekend? Relaxation, motherfuckers.
Y’all do the same.
#WeekendCoffeeShare: Ravioli edition
If we were having coffee (and I feel like I need to point out that, unlike last time, I actually am having coffee while writing this) I would spend most of the conversation being interrupted by the kitten, who has decided that my feet are the tastiest thing in the universe, regardless of whether I’m barefoot, in socks, or wearing my shoes. This started off as cute and endearing and now I’m seriously trying to think of a way to bash together some shame cones to wear over my feet whenever I’m in a room that she can get into because the assaults are constant and she’s too small to kick.
I could probably get her halfway across the house if I tried, though.
(I’m not going to of course I’m not going to Jesus but Goddammit leave my feet alone.)
Anyway.
We had Thanksgiving yesterday. There have been persistent rumors that my wife’s family is planning some sort of extravagant event in Michigan for Actual Thanksgiving, and my brother and his wife just bought a new house, so we decided to kill a couple of birds with one stone and we all went up to his place north of Chicago for Very Early Thanksgiving yesterday. We are mostly German and Polish with a smattering of English and Welsh; he married into an Italian family and brought all of them over as well, so yesterday was Teach the Polacks How to Make Ravioli Day, because why wouldn’t it be? So we spent probably three or four hours making a couple hundred raviolis. I didn’t actually make the pasta itself– my mom was handling that– but my brother and my dad and I were responsible for filling the raviolis and then covering them and, in general, finishing everything up. It went pretty well:
It went very well– I’ve actually never made fresh pasta before, and while I sort of wanted to be in the kitchen for the actual pasta-making part at least once, being the last person in the process means you get to pretend the whole thing was your doing, which is still kinda fun. Dinner was delicious and I even managed to not pass out and die on the way home, which was also a plus.
We would probably start hinting around this election thing on Tuesday at some point and I would change the subject as fast as I possibly fucking could. I have Tuesday off; part of me feels like this was a very good decision (there will be violence at polling places this week) and part of me is mourning the idea that I’m going to be home all day by myself to go crazy. I’m going to spend the whole day playing Red Dead Redemption 2 just to keep from going insane.
The other thing on my mind: the Pegasus Author Expo coming up next Sunday in Lafayette:
I am super excited about this event; I’m doing a panel on book production at 12:00 and a reading/Q&A for half an hour or so at 11:30. I’m currently killing myself trying to figure out what to read (current theory: the prologue to Skylights and something funny from one of the Benevolence Archives books) and trying to mentally prepare for anything from a big crowd (a “big crowd,” in this context, means “any number of people that I cannot accurately count in less than a couple of seconds”) to my wife and my assistant (I have an assistant!) and no one else. This is the first time this group has done something like this and nobody really knows what to expect in terms of attendance so I’m deciding to look at it mostly as a networking event with a chance to practice some public-speaking skills. If I make some money and sell some books along the way, awesome. If not? That’s a whole lot of Indiana authors to touch base with. Which is absolutely a good thing regardless.
You should come. You should bring everyone you have ever met.
Okay, coffee’s cold so I’ve yapped enough. How’re you?
In which that wasn’t a joke
In the long run of things, this probably isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s still on my mind, so fuck it, I’m talking about it. I work high-end retail, right? We all know this. So I’m working on the Fourth of July, just like a whole lot of other people. I actually get it pretty well; normally big national holidays mean everybody has to work all day (and Wednesday is usually my half day) but we’re closing at six, so my Big Holiday Work Schedule is having to work a fairly inconsequential three and a half extra hours for the week. I’m gonna survive. Frankly, my birthday is the 5th and that’s always overshadowed the Fourth for me. Call me unpatriotic if you like.
So dude calls on Wednesday to find out if whateverthefuck he ordered is in. He’s not one of my guests– and, incidentally, my tolerance for putting up with even an iota of crap from people I’m not personally making money from has been declining precipitously lately– and I look his stuff up and find out that it’s in the store. We had received a delivery that day; chances are it had just come in a few hours prior to the phone call. I offer to set up his delivery. As it turns out, the rest of this current week is full but all of next week (ie, the first week of July) is pretty much entirely open. I tell him that and point out that we do deliver on the 4th (if we’re open, we’re open) if Wednesday works for him.
There’s a pause.
“You’re delivering on the Fourth?”
Another pause.
“You should be shot.”
…
Now, there’s really not much left to this story. I told him everybody in the store was working that day but that I appreciated the murder threat. He acted like he didn’t hear me. I didn’t hang up on him or cancel his shit (although if I remembered his name, I might seriously jump in and reschedule him for, like, 2028 without telling anyone) and I sure as shit didn’t tell his entitled white Republican ass (argue with me, I dare you) to shut the fuck up and die alone and in pain like I probably ought to have. He snarled at me that he wanted the 3rd, I scheduled it, got off the phone, and then sent this email to my regional manager:
(I had, as you probably gleaned from context, just sent my RSM an email prior to getting that phone call.)
He wrote me back and told me he appreciated the laugh, apparently misreading the tone of my email, which was meant to be “this is fucked up, this guy is fucked up, I’m tired as hell of fucked up, and next time this won’t go as well,” not “here’s a funny anecdote about a routine thing that just happened to me.”
But yeah. Maybe I’m taking shit too serious. But these fuckers are getting more and more emboldened on a damn near minute-to-minute basis, and it’s just like a fucking Republican to get mad at the motherfucker who has to be at work rather than the motherfuckers who are making them come to work, and I don’t want anything to do with these entitled, violent, stupid assholes any longer.
…yeah, I got nothing
Twitter has completely sapped my Will to Internet today, and most of the energy I do have had has been put toward playing Clue with my wife and son. I kind of enjoy the kids’ version, where instead of trying to solve a murder (and identify a murder weapon) you are trying to figure out who ate a cake that wasn’t supposed to be eaten yet and what beverage they consumed along with the illicitly-eaten cake. The mechanics aren’t all that different, though.
Screw it; it’s Father’s Day, if there was ever a day where I was entitled to laze about and not do much that was useful to anyone outside my immediate family, this is it.
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