The literacy crisis is real

On June 13, 2026June 13, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Go ahead, watch this TikTok video, which is being weirdly inconsistent about whether it’s willing to embed:

@victorvacheroncomedy
Celsius was designed by scientists. Fahrenheit was designed by someone who had to go outside. ☀️ ❄️ #USA #Weather #Europe #Travel #Comedy
♬ original sound – victorvacheroncomedy

In response to this video, I posted the following comment:

You will note that that comment has 4601 Likes in 8 hours, which is a pretty good number! I don’t mind getting lots of likes on comments. However, right after taking all of the screenshots I needed for this post, I deleted the comment. Why? Because the dumbest fucking people on Earth found it, and I cannot believe the pure bullheaded illiteracy on display in the many responses to this comment. This is just a sampling, guys, and the number of people who seemed to think that I literally meant human beings boil is absolutely staggering. Have a gallery:

I can’t decide which is worse: the “we don’t really boil” people, the “ONLY AT SEA LEVEL” pedants (the variance in boiling temperature is about 7% from sea level to the top of Mount fucking Everest; shut up), or the people who don’t seem to understand what fevers are. My favorite is the person who claims to have had a 106 degree fever for two full days; 106 degrees is a five-alarm, get-your-ass-to-the-hospital-NOW fever. 106 degrees will kill you stone fucking dead. Then there are the people who thought that I meant that people would … literally freeze into a block … at 0 degrees? Are you kidding? Tell me you’re kidding.

I mean, beach_lily really thought “Literally not true” was something worth saying. You’re right! Of fucking course people don’t literally boil! What the fuck is wrong with you that you thought you needed to point that out?

I’ve said it before many times, and I’ll say it again: it should be painful to be this dumb. Your brain should shock you or something. You should pass out before you finish expressing thoughts this dumb. I am absolutely willing to live by this; I live in daily, constant fear of actually being as dumb as these people seem to be. This is “democracy is a terrible idea” level dumb. These people’s votes count!

Society is so fucking doomed.

I need a higher class of opponent

On February 8, 2026February 8, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, life1 Comment

I have spent far too much of today arguing with deeply stupid people on social media, and my God, y’all, the literacy crisis is real. The literacy crisis is real and I am not very bright, but I am stupid in a different way from, for example, someone willing to argue that there are only white people in the town I live in, or someone who wants to argue about what a legal disclaimer means but clearly hasn’t actually read the Goddamned thing. I am stupid because I am unable to simply block these fools and move on with my life, or better yet, avoid activities that cause me to be exposed to them in the first place.

In my defense, at least one of them started it.

Like, there weren’t even any opinions involved today. Text can be interpreted, sure, but phrases like “in perpetuity,” “throughout the world,” and “for any reason” have a fairly plain meaning, and demographic data exists. I sometimes like to pretend I still live in a world where at least semi-objective reality exists, and I’m too old to adapt to a post-truth existence.

The internet was a colossal mistake, is what I’m saying here, along with virtually every single other thing that has happened to society since, oh, Ronald Reagan. I use the words “everything is going to get worse all the time forever” fairly frequently, but I don’t really believe it, because the depth of dumb out there keeps managing to surprise me.

I am not watching the Super Bowl, in accordance with my standard practice, and I am not watching the halftime show either. I watched Kendrick’s show live last year, after spending far too long fucking with streaming platforms, and I just don’t care about Bad Bunny enough to fuck around with it this year. I admit that I’m curious whether anyone at NBC or whoever the hell is broadcasting the thing is smart enough to know to bleep “chinga la migra,” but I assume anything interesting that happens is going to be all over TikTok tomorrow so I’m not going to worry about it.

My wife is going to be out of town all week, so I’m on solo Dad duty, which isn’t much of a problem except for the number of tasks it adds to my mornings. My son’s schedule and mine differ enough that he’s generally not even out of bed when I leave for work, and while we have someone picking him up to take him to school my wife generally handles the three hours of reminders and gradually-sterner pokes in the ribs it takes to drag his eighth-grade ass out of bed, not to mention things like lunch-packing and such. He’s going to have to get up earlier so that I can make sure he’s conscious and vertical before his ride shows up, and I’m going to have to get up earlier to make sure everything is ready on time.

I also have to remember to pick him up on the way home from school, also not normally my job. Luckily we live close enough that the one day I slip into autopilot and drive home, I can turn around and go to pick him up and just pretend that I got tied up at work and couldn’t leave right away. Nobody has to know, right?

Anyway, my wife’s train— yes, train— leaves at midnight, so I’ve got some time to kill before I drop her off at the station. What’s that, Nioh 3? Yes, Daddy will be there soon.

You are adorable (dumb)

On June 18, 2015June 17, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

So the Snowpiercer review’s been spiking in hits again lately. I followed a new and surprisingly robust referrer back last night only to discover that among the usual chorus of derps suggesting that I JUST! DIDN’T! GET! IT! there was one accusing me of plagiarizing the title of the review.

The title of the review is SNOWPIERCER: I HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED, HATED THIS MOVIE. I’m not linking to it. It’s not hard to find.

If you are remotely film-literate, you recognize that as being very close to a line from a review Roger Ebert wrote of a film called “North,” differing only in the addition of the word Snowpiercer, which one would clearly not expect to appear in a review of North from many years before Snowpiercer actually came out. One of his books, named after that line, is I Hated, Hated, Hated This Movie.

Everyone fucking knows about that line. Ev. Er. Y. One.

When literate people do this, it is called a reference, and you are supposed to notice it. It is not “plagiarism,” which is an entirely different and completely unrelated thing. There is another of these tricksy “references” somewhere in this article! See if you can spot it.