It’s still cold as hell outside

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…just in case anyone was wondering. I walked out to the mailbox in jeans and a zipup hoodie a few hours ago just to see what would happen, and by the time I got to my mailbox my mustache had frozen.

I look forward to the inevitable videos tomorrow of people tossing boiling water into the cold air and watching it freeze. Maybe I’ll even make one. Just remember, folks: always throw your hot water downwind, and make sure that’s not where the cameraperson is standing.

In which the world refuses to generate posts for me

Luther M. Siler

Let’s see.  Here’s what’s going on lately:

  • I’m trying to 100% Spider-Man PS4, which has mostly meant letting the boy take over every now and again so he can go catch criminals;
  • I’m losing steam on Red Dead Redemption 2, which is suffering from a not-moving-fast-enough main story and way too much to do in the rest of the game, leading to option paralysis;
  • I’m rereading the Broken Earth books by N.K. Jemisin, which continue to be awesome, and are in fact better now that I’m rereading/binging them;
  • I have heard that we get both a Captain Marvel and an Avengers 4 trailer this week, which … well, prepare for enthusiasm on my part about that; 
  • I had a dream last night about The Goddamn Skylights Sequel, where someone else wrote it for me and published it and it was OK for me to take all the credit;
  • I am starting to think about the annual 10 Best New(*) Books I Read This Year post, and kind of wish I had thought to do a 10 Best New(*) Books I Read From 2013-2018 post last year, when it would have been a nice even five years.  Maybe I’ll do that this year for the past six.
  • I need about 5000 pageviews in December to have had more blog traffic than last year.  That ought to be a very achievable number the way things have been going lately so long as traffic doesn’t crater too hard around Christmas.
  • Work is fine, but I have way too many meetings coming in the next couple of weeks and I’m not remotely prepared for the one I have tomorrow.  Hopefully there’s going to be a way to compress the schedule for the pre-meeting training (yeah, that’s a thing) that I looked at once and abandoned once I realized how many 20-minute videos they wanted me to watch.
  • The fastest way to get me to abandon doing anything is to expect me to watch videos of any length at all, by the way, and I can’t believe people don’t realize that.  I can’t speed up a video and I don’t have 17 uninterruptible minutes right now, so you go to hell and I’m not gonna watch any of it.
  • I’m working on doubling my Twitter following.  20K or bust!
  • I discovered today, in the process of reading about and laughing at Tumblr’s decision to set itself on fire on the 17th, that I still have a Tumblr.  So I fiddled around on Tumblr for a while.  I still don’t know what the hell Tumblr is.  

None of that was worth a post on its own, but hopefully all together there was something interesting in there.  What’s going on in your end of the world?

Tuesday miscellany

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hannah-gadsby-2No overarching theme today, just a few random bits and bobs that are on my mind.  Hooray for Tuesday!

  • I’m on Day Three of The Week of Single Daddery, and it’s going great.  It took less than 12 hours of my wife being gone before I stepped in a pile of warm dogshit in my hallway, left there by a dog that had been let outside less than half an hour previously.  It was early in the morning and I was barefoot.  Because of course I was.   Last night, my not-quite-seven-year-old son took a shit that was, I swear I am not exaggerating, the size of my fist in our main bathroom.  I heard him flush but did not realize at the time that the shit was too big to flush, and we have one of those toilets that claims to be able to pass a couple dozen golf balls without trouble.  I had to cut that fucking piece of shit up with a plastic knife this morning to get it to flush, and it was actually kinda difficult to saw through.  My wife can come home anytime she wants.
  • Also, he wet the bed the night before last.  Parenting in general has just been wonderful lately.
  • I watched Hannah Gadsby’s Netflix special, Nanette, last night.  It is getting more and more true that the reason to subscribe to Netflix is their original programming, guys.  If you read me on a regular basis you have probably seen recommendations for this special in the same places I have, and let me echo them: this is an important piece of work, and you should absolutely make sure to watch it.  I’m not going to talk about it in much detail because I kind of wish I had gone in blind, and if you’re able to watch this special without knowing anything other than Luther Siler says I need to watch this, please go do so.
  • So this just happened:

Screen_Shot_2018-07-31_at_1_00_55_PM

  • I signed up for an all-day training for NewJob tomorrow, and I’ve already seen several signs that I’m not going to enjoy it very much.  On the one hand, it’s a $100 stipend, and I just found out when my first paycheck is going to be and the end of August and the beginning of September are gonna be scary, and on the other hand I have other things I would rather be doing tomorrow and it’s not like that $100 is going to come early.  I got an email yesterday about a two-hour pre-workshop homework thing they want me to do.  I have shit to do today.  I’m not super interested in two hours of homework, especially for a pedagogical technique that as near as I can tell will not work at all with kids who won’t do homework.  I am tempted to show up without doing any of mine and asking the trainer what she thinks should be done about me.  Or I could just cancel.  Who knows?
  • I spent most of yesterday rereading the early manuscript for Sunlight.  What I have written is actually pretty damn good, I think.  And I’m getting closer and closer to getting the overarching plot issues sorted out so that I can avoid Middle Book Syndrome.    It’s coming!  I swear!  Eventually!
  • I beat Dark Souls Remastered a few weeks ago, and have been replaying through Bloodborne since then.  I’m doing a lot better than the first time I played through; I never managed to beat Martyr Logarius on my first playthrough and I clobbered his ass on my first try this time.  I’m up to the second to last boss, who beat me several times yesterday.  I’ll get him today, dammit, then it’s on to another shot at either 2 or 3, neither of which have I beaten.  I love this series, but it took several games before I actually got halfway good at it.
  • I had a free consultation at a local LASIK clinic this morning.  LASIK is way less expensive than I had thought, and it turns out I’m a more or less perfect candidate for it.  I’m broke as hell right now, mind you, but I think this is something that is probably on my agenda for next summer.  Time to start socking money away.

More later, maybe, if I come up with anything else I want to talk about today.

 

Memory lane

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…so, remember how last time they changed my medication I spent a week asleep?

…yeah.

In which I am a whining whiny whinersaurus wrex

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helpful-parenting-tips-for-new-parents-27-photos-13So the boy’s new way of going to sleep at night is he doesn’t.  What he does instead is squeal and yell and talk to himself and shout and sing for, oh, four hours or so, punctuated by roughly hourly demands that his mother come attend to some minor need of his.  Occasionally I try to be the one to tell him to shut the fuck up and go to sleep attend to his needs, at which point he gets pissed off that the wrong parent is being inconvenienced and shit gets worse.  He was up past midnight last night, which means he was up somewhere between an hour and an hour and a half past the point where my wife and I went to bed, meaning that in addition to the squealing and the occasional musing about lacing his last drink of the night with some sort of tranquilizer I also got the fun mental exercise of is it going to cause a fight if I just shut off the fucking baby monitor?  Because he’s right down the fucking hallway and we’ll hear him if he hollers anyway and then not doing it because the last thing I need right now at bloody zero dark thirty is an argument about whether we still need a baby monitor.

Anyway: point is, it’s 9 AM, I’ve been up since 6:30, I have no memory of anything between my wife and son leaving for the morning and right now, and I’m hoping that what I think is the second cup of coffee of the day kills this headache.  I’m getting dangerously close to the point where I need to declare a “no screens at all” day, which is trouble, because I’ve got a short story due in a couple of days and I’m trying to write a novel, and I kind of need to look at screens to do either of those things.

<stares dully at screen for ten minutes>

Okay.  Yeah.  Not getting much done today.

tl;dr waaaaaaahhhhhhhhh