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.)

#REVIEW: The SHADOWS OF THE APT series, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

On June 20, 2024June 20, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I am tempted, in writing about Adrian Tchaikovsky’s ten-book, 6000+ page, nearly two million word series Shadows of the Apt, to be terse: read it.

But, like, that’s kind of a big ask, y’know? The series is 1.924 million words long. As a comparison, the Wheel of Time series is 4.36 million words. A Song of Ice and Fire is currently at 1.749 million, with two imaginary books left to go. James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series is 1.493 million words. The entire length of this blog: 1.563 million words. The King James Bible is around 785,000, depending on how you count and who you ask.

Oh, and there are apparently four volumes of short stories outside the main story? I just found out they existed, finding out they existed made me want to die, and I don’t know how much they add.

It’s a lot. And what fascinates me is that Shadows of the Apt has got to be the least well-known of all the big fantasy megaseries. Tchaikovsky writes seventeen books a year (he has, no joke, released five new books since I’ve been reading this series. I mean it. I’m not kidding.) and I don’t feel like the guy gets nearly enough credit for being as amazing as he is. Shadows was written between —

— you may want to sit down, as this is ridiculous —

— 2008 and 2014. All of those books came out in six years, and I’d bet money that he released books unrelated to SotA during that time, plus, remember, those four extra books.

I do not know a single other person who has read this series, and I never see anyone talking about it. I can’t explain this.

I picked up Empire in Black and Gold in October, and I finished Seal of the Worm earlier this week, obviously with a lot of detours. The series breaks down rather nicely into a four-book series, Empire through Salute the Dark, and I took a decent-size break in between that and picking up The Scarab Path. Path and Sea Watch feel pretty stand-alone, as they do a Two Towers sort of thing and don’t share a lot of characters, and then the last four books go in a big gulp, but they follow pretty closely on the events of Path and Sea Watch.

I haven’t said a single word about the actual fuckin’ story yet.

Adrian Tchaikovsky likes bugs. Outside of John Irving he may be the most “Oh, there it is” author I’ve ever read. Every John Irving book is going to include weird sex, an amputation, a bear, a hotel, and wrestling. Adrian Tchaikovsky books without bugs are rare. And in Shadows of the Apt, every character is a bug. Every single one.

Well. Sorta. The human race is divided into something called kinden, and each kinden has the characteristics of a type of bug, which somehow sounds weirder than it is. They’re all still human, mind you, and kinden can interbreed, but there are Beetle-kinden and Wasp-kinden and Mantis-kinden and … let’s see, spiders, flies, bees, ants, moths, mosquitoes, scorpions (there’s a reason I said “bug” and not “insect”), dragonflies, woodlice, and, uh, Mole Crickets.

I admit it, I burst out laughing the first time a Mole Cricket-kinden showed up in the book. That’s not an exhaustive list by any means, especially since a handful of the kinden are spoilers, and I never got the feeling that Tchaikovsky had sat down and written out an exhaustive list that he was never going to break away from. I’m pretty sure there’s a stick bug kinden in there somewhere that only gets mentioned a handful of times, and there’s exactly one butterfly-kinden in the entire series. I think if he got an idea for a character with a new kinden, he just put them in and rolled with it.

oh my god I just googled mole cricket for the first time oh my god OH MY GOD WHAT the FUCK

Anyway, most of the main characters are Beetles and Wasps, with a few significant Mantises and Spiders, but by the end of the series the list of characters is like eight pages long. Some kinden have, effectively, powers– Wasps have a sting that is basically a force blast they can shoot from their hands, several kinden can fly, and Ants are effectively a hive mind, and not all of them are completely human-shaped– Mole Crickets (brrrr) are ten feet tall, for example, and Mantis-kinden have some spiky bits that the rest don’t have. Some can see in the dark. Some can dig basically as fast as they can walk. You get the idea. There are cultural differences as well, although the series does take some pains to not be completely “orcs are like this, and elves are like that,” if you know what I mean. Spiders are gonna be Like That, but then he’ll throw a Spider at you that isn’t Like That, just to make sure you realize there’s diversity in the kinden.

So yeah, the first four books are the Wasps basically trying to take over the world. That war ends in book four. In the back six they basically consolidate what they lost in the first war and then try again, and the entire tenth book is a spoiler. The big problem with maxiseries like this is that there can be a lot of filler– I will never get tired of pointing out that the entire second book of The Wheel of Time could be a ten-page prologue to book three without losing anything– and it’s amazing how well this series keeps the plot moving. If anything, I felt like Book Ten could be broken into two books with another 300 pages and I’d have been fine with it, as some of the developments in that book feel like they come kind of out of left field. The flabbiest part of the series is The Sea Watch, which is the only book that’s remotely skippable, and even that one is stuffed full of tons of crazy cool ideas. It’s just that they don’t pay off sufficiently in subsequent books, which is part of why I feel like Seal of the Worm could be two books.

The different kinden are broken into two categories, the Apt and the Inapt. Apt kinden can use technology, and the work various groups of Apt artificers do over the course of the series to forge new ways to kill each other is genuinely impressive. Inapt kinden simply cannot use technology, and I’ll admit that figuring out what this exactly meant was one of my few complaints about the series. What is meant by that is that you can literally hand a crossbow, powered by a trigger, to an Inapt Mantis-kinden and they will be unable to figure out that pulling the trigger will shoot the thing. Most of the races that have major characters are Apt, and you don’t really get into the head of an Inapt character until really late, so it takes a while for it to sink in that Tchaikovsky really means it when he says at one point that if a door is opened by a button, an Inapt character will not be able to figure out how to open that door or understand how it works even if someone else shows them. Ultimately, this is a fantasy series, with swords and armor and such, but the artificers and the Apt kinden give a nice soupçon of science fiction to go with it.

(Yes, I wrote that sentence just so I could say soupçon.)

There is also magic, but … Christ, that’s a whole thing, and it’s practically a spoiler just to say that, but let’s say that the back part of the series is more about magic and the Apt vs the Inapt than the first part is, where that distinction is really in the background.

So much for being terse.

Please read this series. Come back in two years and let me know when you’re done. I need someone to talk to about it.

On the decline of the species

On February 24, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

No, not humanity, although I’m sure I’ll write a post with that title about us eventually. I consider myself at least a nominally environmentally-inclined guy, although I generally let my wife (who actually possesses an advanced degree in environmental science) take the lead on the various green initiatives we participate in around the house. I like animals. I even like bugs. I understand that we need them around and that they need to be protected and that the average living thing is in fact a living thing and generally ought to be allowed to live independent of any human wishes or desires on the matter.

Unless we want to eat them, of course.

That said, the internet has 24 hours to come up with a reason why stink bugs need to exist or I’m going to go full-blown Mad Scientist on their asses and eradicate the entire species. I generally hear that the reason we can’t get rid of all the mosquitoes is because bats like to eat ’em and bats are awesome. Well, OK, that doesn’t apply to stink bugs, who don’t really fly and can’t be caught on the wing. Plus they live in buildings. So no bats. They’re probably too big for your average spider. They aren’t pollinators. As far as I can tell they exist for no other reason than to suddenly be in my house or place of business walking on something that they ought not to be walking on– like, say, the rim of a cup I like to drink from, or my fucking toothbrush. And then I can’t even satisfyingly smush them because they are stink bugs. They are the worst and I hate them and they all need to die.

24 hours and then I figure out how to destroy them all. If there are no comments I will assume the entire world agrees and will help with the project.

Thank you for your time.

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

On September 23, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek1 Comment

I’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.

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.

Yeah haha whatever

On September 7, 2016September 7, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn ReadingLeave a comment

Normal blogging is suspended today because I damn near just stayed up last night until I had Chuck Wendig’s INVASIVE finished, only that would have meant very little sleep, and I was enough of a zombie at work today as it was. I have tomorrow off, so I’m ferdamnsure gonna get the thing finished before I sleep.

Expect a review soon. In the meantime, spoiler alert, I’m gonna tell you to buy the damn book so you may as well go ahead and do that.

In which I tell a ridiculous true story

On December 14, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories10 Comments

Gnat_1_(FFXI) So there’s a bug in my room.

I mean that literally. Not “there are bugs in my room.” I think there is a bug in my room. As in one.

It’s not a scary bug. It’s a little bitty thing, like a midge or a gnat or something like that, some little black flying thing that’s way too small to be an actual fly but otherwise acts like one.

The problem is it’s immortal.

I have to read before I sleep, right? It takes an exceptional level of exhaustion to get me to simply hit the sheets and try to go to sleep. My wife, however, is very much not like that; my wife can be dead asleep within ten seconds of pulling the covers up. What this means in practice is that for the last six-years-and-change of my life I’ve been doing a lot of reading with a booklight after she’s fallen asleep.

There is only ever one bug. I have never seen more than one.

It only comes out when I’m reading. I’ve never seen it during the daytime, and I’ve never seen it when the lamp by my bed is on. Only when I’m using my booklight.

And it lands on my book, then flies away, then lands on my book again, then lands on my booklight, then I get annoyed and kill it. How do I know there’s only one, and it’s not flying away and another, suspiciously similar-looking bug is then flying over to me? Because when I kill it, it doesn’t come back. I’ve never had to kill two. And I’ve never seen a second one after killing the first one.

Until the next night. It takes 24 hours for the resurrection process to complete, I assume. And then that same one bug will torment me again, while I’m trying to read, until I kill it.

This has been going on for months.

I’m not crazy.

I swear.