In which I have an illness

On December 17, 2025December 17, 2025 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, Reading2 Comments

Careful readers will notice that for some reason there are two copies of Disquiet Gods, Book Six of the Sun Eater series, on that shelf. Exceptionally detail-oriented humans might further notice that they are not exactly the same! The title is a different color, as is the author’s name, the character image is different, and so is the publisher. Further, one title is matte in finish and matches the other books precisely, and the top book appears to be glossy.

You might, just maybe, also notice that the top book is roughly a quarter inch taller than the books below it, but if you don’t, don’t worry; it just means that you’re neurotypical.

Shall I explain? Let me explain. Author and apparent personal nemesis Christopher Ruocchio originally had a five-book contract with DAW for the Sun Eater series. Upon writing five books and not completing the series, he asked for a two-book extension to the contract. DAW offered a single book. And Ruocchio said “bet” and bounced, taking the last two books of the series to Baen, where he used to work as an editor.

Oh, don’t worry, said Baen, we’ll make sure the new books match the old ones! Promise! We’ll use the same artist and everything! And, well, they did use the same artist, but they switched from the matte paper to the glossy paper and made the books ever-so-slightly taller, just different enough that I suspect no one noticed, me included, until the book was on the shelf with its series-mates.

And then a certain subset of humanity of which I am a member lost their minds, because why in the merry hell would you do your best to make sure that the books mostly match, except for those two kind of important details? You get no credit for that at all! None! We hate you!

(By “you,” I mean the publisher, a faceless corporate entity; I’m completely certain Ruocchio had nothing to do with this decision. The man is an author so I suspect he’s One of Us anyway.)

Here’s how they looked originally:

And, again, if that doesn’t bother you, it just means you’re normal. It’s okay to be normal. Also, the book isn’t deeper than the others, just … puffier? I don’t know why it looks so much further forward on the shelf than the books next to it.

Anyway, at some point DAW came to their senses? And apparently bought his contract with Baen out, and now they’re publishing the whole series again, including their version of the book that Baen originally published and the final book. I have to believe this cost them more money than just giving Ruocchio the two books he wanted at the beginning, but I have no idea. So the new DAW version of the book matches the rest precisely, as it should. I’m going to do another book cull over winter break, and the original version of the book will end up in the basement. I can imagine a universe where it’s worth slightly more than cover price in the future, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

(For the record, I bought most of my Christmas presents with my Amazon card, which I get 5% back on. Not that paying for it would have stopped me, but I got the second copy of the book basically for free.)

This is, believe it or not, not the greatest spine-matching sin that has been perpetrated on my bookshelves. I bought an entire special edition of Ken Liu’s Dandelion Dynasty series so that I didn’t have to look at this abomination any longer:

Again: why are they just sort of the same? Why change things, guaranteeing you’re going to enrage a certain portion of your readers, but just change them a little? If the shit’s not gonna match, just fuckin’ go nuts and completely redesign everything. This makes no Goddamn sense at all. I was already mad enough when Veiled Throne lost the gold and the embossed title, but I was willing to put up with it. The rest of those changes are just gratuitously evil.

I’m going to go take some sort of pill; I suspect I need one.

On streaks

On February 10, 2024February 10, 2024 By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy3 Comments

I’m starting to think that I have an unreasonable number of Things I’m Supposed to Do Every Day. I didn’t post last night because I got home from work, had dinner, and collapsed; I was in bed by 8:00 and dead to the world by nine, and at around 8:40 it occurred to me that I hadn’t blogged yet and I almost got out of bed to write a quick post. The thing is, I don’t know how many different things is a reasonable number of things that I do every day, or at least do so often that I notice if I don’t do them on any particular day. Shall we list them? Why not!

Blog. Now, granted, I don’t do this every day, but I’m trying to write more this year than last year and I really don’t like taking more than one day off a week. At one point I went for around (nearly?) two years without missing a day. I don’t feel the need to build up that kind of streak again but I definitely want missed days to be infrequent.
The Whole Year Puzzle. My wife got me this thing for Christmas; that’s it up there; I probably should have taken the pieces out, but you get the idea– the months are across the two rows at the top and the rest are days, from 1-31, and supposedly you can rearrange the wood pieces to show every single day of the year. There are multiple ways for most (all?) of the days, too– every time Bek and I have compared our days (she has one too) they have been different. It’s set to Feb 11 because I try to keep it a day ahead. I didn’t do this yesterday either, so today I did the 10th and the 11th, because I can’t skip a day.
Wordle. You all know what Wordle is. Takes two minutes, most days. My longest unbroken streak of wins was 167. It’s been 292 days since I skipped one. Prepare for a NYT games streak, by the way.
NYT Mini Crossword. Generally under a minute. I occasionally go on tears where I’ll do the regular crossword every day, but the longer ones can take over an hour and I don’t usually want to burn that much time. The Mini is much shorter.
Spelling Bee, also an NYT game. I win this every day and I try to do it without any clues. I’m not successful at that terribly often– maybe once or twice a week. That said, I usually only need clues for the last four or five words at most, and there are sometimes up to 70 words. I don’t actually play Connections very often because I’m terrible at it. I lose more often than I win.
Duolingo. I’m back on my Arabic again; I deleted all my progress and started over, but I’m doing a full … circle? Lesson? Whatever they call them, I’m doing one of them a day.
Busuu. I’m keeping a streak up here as well. Busuu breaks down into chapters and lessons; I’m in Chapter 4, Lesson 5, and shit is getting complicated fast. That said, I’m still doing a lesson a day. It’s a lot harder than Duolingo but I feel like I’m learning more effectively. That said, the tiny font is still killing me. I may switch this to my iPad to see if the increased screen real estate leads to bigger letters. I could learn to read this damn language if I could just see it.

The weird thing is looking at that right now, I feel like it’s not that much? But I also feel like I spend way too much of every day thinking about whether I’ve finished xxx yet or not, and that might be a sign that it’s time to cut some stuff. How can I do all this and still spend six hours fucking around on TikTok every night? I gotta keep my priorities straight, people!

Elden Ring, 35 hours in, and the channel

On March 9, 2022 By Luther M. SilerIn video games1 Comment

First, the I’m-maybe-a-third-of-the-way-through review: Elden Ring is phenomenal, a towering achievement that has all sorts of interesting things to say about its predecessors from FromSoft and the notion of “open world” gaming to boot; this is one of the best games I’ve ever played on any console, and if my opinion ends up changing on that front it will be because ultimately there ended up being too much of it and it got overwhelming.

What’s killing me is I’ve got the next two games for the channel on deck already, and they’re both also huge, and I recorded episode forty-seven tonight for Elden Ring and … yeah, I’m maybe a third of the way through. Maybe. This is going to dominate my channel for two months, easy, unless I increase the number of episodes per day that I’m airing, and even then I could see it going two months. Three episodes a day for 60 days is 180 episodes. That’s not unimaginable. And I’m regularly crushing my typical 30-minute limit because breaking every half hour just doesn’t make sense the way the game is structured– there are no missions, like there usually are in an open-world game, so there’s not a situation where you can go do something and it takes 20 minutes and it’s discrete. There’s always a tower in the distance or a cave to explore or a new boss that’s killed me five times in this episode and I’m pretty damn sure I can kill the motherfucker with one more try, and it leads to longer episodes. The cool factor is off the charts. I’ve already used the word overwhelming once; it’s absolutely the right word.

What’s a real pain in the ass is feeling like I’ve got to record it all. I started the channel last June, so we’re at about 9 months now, give or take, and I’ve been rock-solid about not missing episodes that entire time; at least two a day, with occasional but rare 8:00 episodes as well. I’ve got 115 subscribers; I was led to believe by the Internet that subscriber counts would start rising more drastically once I hit 100, and so far that hasn’t happened, and … I may be getting tired of waiting. I mean, the chance that this was going to lead to any kind of money was slim to begin with (it is worth pointing out that that 115 followers puts me in the top 5% of YouTubers globally) and the channel definitely has some fans, but having to spend an hour a night or more locked in my office playing video games and occasionally dealing with tech or editing hiccups which takes even longer is kinda getting old. I think I remember what the boy looks like; he comes in occasionally to ask for money.

I dunno. This could just be the tired talking, but I’m starting to feel like the work/fun balance in this whole thing is starting to tilt too much toward work, and I might need to reevaluate some things. I’ll finish this series out, so it’ll be a minute, but I need to think.

(I uploaded four episodes while I was writing this, by the way.)

On dopamine

On November 6, 2021 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, idiocy, video games1 Comment

I wrapped up my Let’s Play of Blasphemous today, which is going to run 30 episodes, and since Episodes 10 and 11 just dropped today I’ve got a minute before I have to start the next thing. If you haven’t paid any attention to my videos, the thing you need to know about the game for the purpose of understanding this post is that it’s loaded with collectibles and secret rooms and all sorts of things that my lizard brain covets because I am that type of player. When I beat the game I had a completion percentage in the high nineties but was still missing several clearly unimportant but still not in my damn inventory items, and I spent a good chunk of this afternoon finishing off finding the last handful of things and finding every single spot on the map.

This was, mind you, a lot of stuff, and required not one, not two, but four different “here is where all this stuff is” websites and/or YouTube tutorials to find everything. Most of this, for the record, was not filmed, but was done for my own edification and because I am insane. After all of it my completion percentage was an agonizing 99.81%. Not acceptable! I must have 100%.

So I found another video that purported to show the hardest-to-find spots on the map; mostly out-of-the-way places that don’t scan “HEY LOOK HERE FOR A SECRET” on the map or on the screen and require you to whack a wall or a corner of a wall that you might not have any good reason to go near so that you can open up a single, small room.

After finding two new rooms, the 100% achievement popped for me. Thank God, I thought, thoroughly tired of this by now. I can stop playing and move on to something else for a while.

And then I quit out of the game, then went back to reload my save, because that’s where the most detailed completion percentage is shown for you.

And it was 99.95%. Despite me having gotten the trophy for 100%ing the game.

I have no idea why this might have happened.

And now– only now, after all that– do I feel like perhaps I might have wasted some of my time today.

WOO! update

On April 3, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

All I do with my life is play Bloodborne now so I hope I don’t owe you money. There’s no time to do other things. That’s okay, I needed to lose weight anyway and eating is a distraction.

Can’t have that.

You think you know crazy?

On June 7, 2014June 6, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek4 Comments

THIS is crazy:

I got three minutes and two seconds in, to the third use of the word “back,” before realizing what the hell I was doing and deciding to inflict it on you guys.

(Also, it may take… oh, twenty-five seconds or so for you to figure out what’s going on.)