Well that was fun

On April 11, 2025April 11, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Jesus Christ, look at all the white people.

This is, technically, the last day of my Spring Break, as I’m not supposed to go to work on Saturday or Sunday anyway. So of course I have shit I need to do in the next couple of days to get ready for next week. I said before the week started that I didn’t want to do anything over my break, and holy shit did I succeed at that, as I didn’t even really succeed in doing the bits of nothing I wanted to do.

Which, whatever. It is quite obviously the height of privilege to get a week off and complain about it, so I’m at least going to have the dignity to not do it much. I did finish Hild last night, and I don’t really have anything to say about it that I didn’t say already– you want to read it if you have enough ability to concentrate to be able to read it, and I don’t, and as a result I can say that I appreciated the book but I didn’t enjoy it. I will not be bothering with the sequel, I think. I have a handful of other books I want to finish in the next couple of days before we go back to work; we’ll see how that goes. And since my wife is going to be back tomorrow I should probably spend some time cleaning.

(This is not to say that we lived like animals while she was gone; we didn’t, but still. I don’t want her to come home from a two-day drive and look around and think she needs to clean something.)

I was going to do all that today, but today was the Day of Unintentional Naps. My caffeine immunity is starting to become an actual joke; most people after two large cups of coffee in the morning are wide awake if not actively jittery; I woke up at 8, drank two large cups of coffee, and went back to bed. Then, after getting out of bed, I took a shower and fell asleep on the couch. I dunno what the hell my deal is lately.

Tomorrow, I will try to have something interesting to talk about.

In which I am bad at the subject I teach

On January 9, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

I don’t know— I don’t think this is the case, but I don’t know– if any other jobs outside of education ever are in a position where they experience the phenomenon known as the “two hour delay.” I actually have not experienced very many of them, as my previous district never used them; school was either in session or cancelled, and the only delay I remember ever having turned into a cancellation pretty quickly.

But today the weather was shit in a very specific way at 5:30 in the morning, and promising to be substantially less shit in a couple of hours, and as a result nearly every district in northern Indiana called a two hour delay today. And you would think that as someone who is used to being up at a certain time, being dressed and out of the shower by a certain time, in the car at a certain time, and at work at a certain time, the process of simply adding two hours to all of those things would not be especially complicated.

You would be wrong.

I did, in fact, manage to make it into work in time, but the amount of times I had to recalculate literally all of those times up there, oftentimes being completely unable to remember simple things like when do I leave for work? was truly Goddamned ridiculous. School starts two hours later than normal! That’s all! It sounds uncomplicated, but that’s before you realize that you have completely forgotten when school usually starts, what time you get up (never mind that the alarms are literally still active on your watch) or how long it should take to get to work. I spent the whole morning half-asleep and trying desperately to figure out how much longer I could reasonably stay in bed versus how long I could wait to extract every possible second of bed time instead of, say, getting a perfectly reasonable hour and a half of extra sleep and then having time for a leisurely cup of coffee in a comfortable chair instead of tumbling out of the house at high speed and at the last minute.

I got out of the shower and managed to convince myself that school was starting in ten minutes. I swear to you that my heart rate and my blood pressure spiked. All of this because of an inability to add two to a number.

And it’s entirely possible that tomorrow we get to do the exact same thing again, then a foot of snow on Friday but probably after school is over, then a three-day weekend, then three days of ten below zero before wind chill. So January is proceeding according to expectations so far.

On that coffee

On February 6, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews4 Comments

I had a cup of Importin’ Joe’s Habesha coffee this morning, one of the two types I ordered, and as I was drinking it it occurred to me that I really don’t have any vocabulary for writing anything even approaching a review of a liquid. There is a little blurb on the front of the bag about what “tasting notes” to expect, and I’ll be honest: I picked up on the toffee, I guess, but other than that? It was coffee. It was good coffee, mind you, but I’m not a hundred percent sure how to go into detail about what the differences between “good coffee” and “bad coffee” are, other than that I’ve had Starbucks a couple of times and I understand what people mean when they say that Starbucks coffee tastes burnt. I have finally successfully conditioned myself to be able to drink my coffee black over the course of the last year, and so I didn’t put any additional sugar or creamer or anything like that into it. I’m not opposed to that or anything, but I figure since I can drink coffee black now I may as well drink my first few cups of this unadulterated so that I can learn what it tastes like. And yeah: it’s good stuff; I just wish I could be more elaborate than that.

What’s the best coffee you ever had? And can you tell me what made it the best coffee you ever had?

Fallout 4: The First Two Hours

On November 12, 2015November 12, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ReviewsLeave a comment

It is, as I’m typing this, 7:54 in the AM, and I’ve not had coffee, because my coffeepot won’t coffeepot fast enough. I want to be playing Fallout 4, but I have a rule right now, and that rule is words before video games, so I gotta at least talk about Fallout 4 before I can go play Fallout 4.

I’m starting to really detest this generation of consoles. Now, in the strict interest of honesty, I need to point out that all I have is a PS4, but I have not heard anything better about the Xbox One. Trying to play Fallout the other night required not only an update to the console itself (for network features that I have no interest in and will never ever ever ever ever ever ever use, because if I want to be called the N-word by a nine year old I’ll go to work) but a probably forty minute long installation sequence, during which the game played seven different videos that I couldn’t skip through. The first two were cute, at which point I realized the game really did think I was going to watch the other five and I felt part of my soul die.

I turned off the volume and went to do something else. At least, unlike the vile Metal Gear Solid V, this game didn’t pretend its stupid videos were part of the story. All that said, I would have preferred a goddamn progress bar against a black screen, because that would definitely have signaled go do something else and not this will be cute and funny for five minutes, bearable for ten, and will raise your blood pressure noticeably for the next thirty.

Anyway. Eventually I did actually get to play a game, and I got to choose what I looked like, and it actually mattered, again unlike Metal Gear Solid V, where I still don’t understand why they let me choose what I looked like and then made me look like a mulleted, one-eyed hobo anyway.

Apparently the main story of this game involves saving my kidnapped infant son, which is sorta triggery, by the way, and actually affected my choice of how to play my character, because this lady’s gonna kill the hell out of everything in her way until I find the damn baby. There will be precious few sidequests done before the main quest is finished.

Oh, right. And then, an hour in, they threw this motherfucker at me. Spoilers, but only real mild ones, and you’ve already seen the picture anyway, and it’s an hour in so shut up about spoilers anyway:

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Now, maybe you don’t play video games, or maybe you don’t play Fallout 4, so you’re not going Oh, holy shit, are you kidding? right now. In that case, note that that giant fucker is called a Deathclaw, and understand that it earns that name, and take notice that it looks like a dinosaur on steroids on purpose, and also understand that throwing that thing at you as part of literally one of the game’s very first missions is a sign that the game is not fucking around at all with you and that you probably ought to get used to that shit right now.

It killed me five or six times and I went to bed. Now it’s 8:12 AM, and I’m awake, and my coffee is probably ready by now, so I’m gonna go find a way to kill this nasty sumbitch because I have a lot to do today– we are actually having people over for dinner tonight, so I gotta cook, plus Sunlight, plus cleaning, plus a good half-dozen other miscellaneous chores that are probably good for a couple of hours. Also, the wind is blowing outside like I cannot believe so at some point a tree will probably fall on the house.

But first I gotta kill my ass a Deathclaw and dance on the corpse.

More later.

EDIT: Kilt.

This post is mostly a test

On May 8, 2015May 7, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking14 Comments

I am conducting Blog Science! and in order to do so correctly it is essential that I post this at this godawfully early hour of the morning. Which actually means that I wrote it last night while watching Daredevil and trying to decide if I like the show or not, which is something you’d think I’d have figured out by the eleventh episode.