You should play Anthropeum

On June 28, 2026 By Luther M. SilerIn art, GeekLeave a comment

I have been broadening the number of online daily games I play lately, and I really want to recommend one of them, because I want to compare my scores with more people and talk about the game. You should be playing Anthropeum, is what I’m getting at. Here’s how it works: you are presented with ten artifacts, and the material said artifacts are made of. A lot of the time, you’ll have more than one view of the artifact, so you can get multiple angles or whatever, but sometimes it’s just the one shot.

Your job is to place the artifact on a map of the world, and nail down where it came from within a 250-year range. You get points based on how close you came on either axis, with a possible 10,000 points per item if you get both completely correct. You have three hints available; the hints will give you either the date within a thousand year range (more helpful than you might think) or a verbal description of the location, such as “Mesoamerica” or “West Africa”. You can get both if you want but that will use two hints.

I am absolutely terrible at this game and I am enjoying the hell out of it. I am allowing myself some limited research– if an artifact is described as being made of a certain kind of stone, you can sure as hell bet that I’m going to see if that stone is only found in a particular part of the globe, for example– but realistically you can find every item on the list with a reverse image search and I’m not about to do that. My best day was two days ago, where I was in the top 9% of all players worldwide. Interestingly, my highest score was about 75,000 (remember the maximum score would be 100K) but that gave me a lower percentile than the day I was in the top 9%. I had a day where I was in the bottom decile.

The two items up there that you have no clue about are a winged pendant from (roughly) pre-Colombian Colombia and a spoon, 15th or 16th century, from Nigeria. If I remember correctly (and it’s too bad that at the moment the site won’t let you go back and look at old games) I had the luckiest guess in history on the pendant and did absolutely atrociously on the spoon.

Anyway, go play and tell me how you did.

On 2023’s books

On March 19, 2023March 19, 2023 By Luther M. SilerIn Reading6 Comments

Reading sucks this year, and I don’t know what to do about it. If you’ve been around for more than a couple of months you know that one of the posts I look most forward to every year is my best books of the year post in late December. I’ve done 10 (!!) of them, and they work like this: I keep track of everything I read on Goodreads, and I keep a shelf for my shortlist for the end of the year. Typically by the end of the year I have 20-25 books on there by the end of the year and I winnow that down to the top 10 or 15 or whatever when I sit down to write the post.

It is 2/3 of the way through March and I don’t have a single book on that list for 2023 yet. And I feel like my DNF rate is way higher than it usually is, too. I’ve read some books I’ve liked, but nothing that moved me to review it and nothing good enough that I was even seriously thinking about it being a contender for the end of the year. Shit, I’ve only read sixteen books so far this year, too, which is way off my usual pace. That’s less than 70 on the year. That’s crazy low. The best thing I’ve read so far is Christopher Buehlman’s The Blacktongue Thief, and I suppose I could put that on the list just to have something but my initial feeling was that it shouldn’t be.

(I feel like anhedonia in general is kind of a problem this year, and I feel like I’ve talked about that relatively recently. I’m not unhappy, mind you, and I definitely don’t think I’m depressed. Hell, between the new job and the life improvements that the CPAP has brought me my mental health is probably as good as it’s been in a really long time. I just … haven’t really found anything to be enthusiastic about in a while?)

What’s new and good out there? Recommend anything you like; y’all know I like my genre stuff but that’s clearly not clicking so well this year so tell me anything you’ve really liked. I want out of this rut, damn it.

Quick question

On March 30, 2018 By Luther M. SilerIn Television1 Comment

I’ve completely lost patience with The Walking Dead, and haven’t watched an episode since the show came back from its midseason hiatus. We’re, I dunno, four or five episodes into the new season of Jessica Jones and I can barely pay attention. I did notice that Season 2 of Into the Badlands was on Netflix, and I’ll watch that, and I binged The End of the Fucking World on Hulu a week or two ago but that’s kinda a one-off.

What’s good in TV right now? Y’all should have a decent idea of what my tastes are like after all this time, right?

I need recommendations

On December 5, 2017December 5, 2017 By Luther M. SilerIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

I’ve been making another stab at getting into podcasts lately. I just took a four-hour road trip last weekend and I tried to grab some recs from Twitter, leading to several hours of listening to Lore and a quick try at Case File that was immediately derailed by the host’s accent, which was just a bit too thick for me to handle in the car.

Lore I liked a bit more, but it’s falling into the same trap that Welcome to Night Vale did–after listening to a half-dozen or so episodes, I am both tiring of the host’s voice and becoming really good at predicting certain tics in the way the show is written. If I’ve got a mental drinking game mapped out for your show after listening for a couple of hours then it’s probably not going to hold my interest for too terribly long.

So: any of you out there listen to a lot of podcasts? Y’all should have a decent idea of what I’m into by now. Any recommendations from those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter and are seeing this for the first time?

In which you receive orders

On June 21, 2014June 21, 2014 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

So here’s the thing. I’m working on a post right now, which is requiring quite a bit more thinking than my blog posts usually need– like, a couple of days’ worth so far. And it’s going to require a bit more writing time than my posts usually need, too, so you probably won’t see it until next week sometime.

As part of this post, I’ve reminded myself what an outstanding goddamn comic book NEXTWAVE: AGENTS OF H.A.T.E. was, and as a result I am demanding that every single one of you order a collected edition from Amazon or download it or (even better) find a local comic shop and buy whatever copies of the series they have available to you.

Right now. Because Warren Ellis is a goddamned mad genius and one day I will hunt him down and eat his brain so I can steal his magical writing powers except that I’m pretty sure he’s also much tougher and cooler and eviller than I am so he would probably end up eating my brain instead and not getting much of use out of it.

Point is, sooner or later one of us is gonna have both our brains. Other point is, you should be reading this comic book because you’ve never heard of it and it’s bloody goddamn brilliant. It’s a weekend, you ain’t got nothin’ to do. Go shopping. Now.

(Speaking of Warren Ellis, and receiving orders, I have just read instructions in my email to tell everyone I know that the first issue of his current project, TREES, is available as a free digital download from Image Comics for the next couple of days. So you should check that out also. Immediately.)