Tag: shopping

In which shopping for clothes somehow gets even worse

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy2 Comments

Every shirt I have that is okay to wear to work is at least three years old, so I’m starting to face the uncomfortable truth that I’m going to have to do some clothes shopping before this school year starts.

(Fun fact: I have two polo shirts that date back to my first teaching job. They are twenty-five years old. They somehow still fit and they do not, in any way, look their age. I promise I’d have tossed them by now if they had gotten ratty.)

Anyway, the tl;dr of this post is that it’s astonishing how many clothes websites are scams, and I came across an especially crispy example of the genre today. I’ve been scammed twice by clothing websites before, and I’m at the point now where before I order from any website I’m not familiar with I Google the name of the site and look for drama. If I find it, they don’t get my money. I saw a shirt I liked in an ad on a website I go to a lot (honestly, I’m at the point where “advertises on websites” is a reason to suspect fuckery is afoot) and clicked on it, and it wasn’t twenty seconds later before I decided the site was a joke.

That shirt above isn’t the shirt I clicked on, but take a look at that picture. There is no fucking way that’s a picture of a real shirt. Like, I’m not bothered by the idea that they might have dropped a model in front of a beach; that’s whatever, but that entire image is AI, and it’s not even fucking good AI. Look at the bottom seam of the shirt. It looks like plastic, and the colors on the entire thing are way too saturated to be real. The collar looks suspicious as hell, too.

This is so obviously a scam– and, upon doing my due diligence, the clothes ship direct from China, because of course they do– that I’m honestly tempted to order that shirt just to compare whatever I get– some cobwebs in a Zip-Loc bag is my guess– to the original image.

Shopping for clothing online, at least for anything more complicated than a T-shirt, was already ludicrous for a whole host of reasons, but it’s gotten to the point where I’m going to have to refuse to shop anywhere other than Amazon or brick and mortar places, and there aren’t a lot of brick and mortar places left that carry my size that aren’t ludicrously expensive.

Slightly related, I got an email from my district earlier today that spirit wear for 2025-26 was available, and went to take a look. Feel free to look around on the site for me bitching about my salary; I know there are plenty of issues with teacher pay, but I personally feel like I’m well-compensated for my work, but they still don’t pay me enough that I’m going to drop $60 on a fuckin’ polo shirt. If I’m wearing a shirt with the logo of the organization I work for, that shirt should be cheap or free. Not more expensive than any other shirt of that style I own.

Anyway, point is, you’ll get a post soon enough where I’m bitching about clothes I actually bought, instead of websites that expect me to send them money so they can send me a bag of ebola. Something for y’all to look forward to.

My day in two images

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, video gamesLeave a comment

This is kind of an #iykyk image, I suppose, but I finally polished off The First Berserker: Khazan tonight after 78 hours, which is absolutely outlandish for an action game. This is a remarkable achievement in game design, even if it has a really stupid name(*), and everyone who likes video games should play it, but God damn is it difficult, to the point where I had to (not “decided to,” had to) turn down the difficulty for the final boss and even then it took a couple more hours. Got the true ending, though, so yay me. I’m actually planning on playing through it one more time to scoop up the couple of trophies I missed. Possibly not immediately, mind you, but it’s definitely happening.

(*) This game features no berserking and no berserkers, in case you were wondering, and in fact has no mention of berserkers in any way. I mean, Khazan’s pretty angry, but it’s a revenge story, so … he sorta has a reason for it? The really interesting thing is that this game is a combination of two of my other all-time favorites– it’s Nioh 2 with Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice‘s combat system bolted on to it, and Sekiro also has a deeply stupid-sounding name that does not match up to anything in the game. Weird, right?

My wife and I went to this local consignment place today, just for the sheer hell of it. The place was 90% junk with a few interesting items scattered here and there– nothing to get us to spend any money, mind you, but some interesting crap– and this caught my eye.

This is the ACABiest ACAB that ever ACABbed, and fuck the semiliterate person who created it (I can only assume that “congol” means “cajole,” which is exceptionally shit spelling), fuck the person who decided to put it up for sale, and fuck anybody who eventually buys it. This is a supremely fucked-up thing to decide to hang on your wall as decor, and thinking of the police this way and approving of it borders on mental illness.

I buy books

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading1 Comment

This week involved– this is not a joke– both having a condom thrown at me and being inadvertently punched in the balls by a student, so, having survived it, I was in serious need of some retail therapy. I went to Barnes and Noble.

Do both of us a favor and don’t add up the cost of any of this.

I purchased Ron Chernow’s doorstop-sized, thousand page, recently-released biography of Mark Twain immediately, but not from Barnes and Noble. This one was expensive enough that I actually ordered it from Amazon, while still in the store, for 2/3 of the cost. It’ll be here tomorrow.

What I’ve started doing when I’m in bookstores is buying books I wasn’t previously familiar with, rather than grabbing things that are already on my wish list. I’ve learned that if I walk into my local B&N looking for something specific I am sure to be disappointed. It will not be there. (To wit: I have the absolutely gorgeous Broken Binding edition of Joe Abercrombie’s new book, The Devils, and was looking for the standard edition as a reading copy. Couldn’t find it. Unbelievable.)

Anyway, this caught my eye, and as a standalone and a debut novel it felt like the perfect kind of bookstore buy.

Then I decided to look around for a specific book that I’d seen the last time I was in the store, The Lion Women of Tehran, by Marjan Kamali. It wasn’t there! Again, any time I’m looking for a specific book, it is never there. But her debut novel was:

So, two or three purchases depending on how you’re counting, one by an established author that I’m certain to enjoy, two debut novels that I’m rolling dice on, no series fiction. So far so good! But then this one caught my eye:

I’m not even completely sure what drew me to this, and I picked it up and put it back down a couple of times, as the plot feels a little been-there-done-that in some ways, but by this point I was in full “fuck it” mode. Speaking of:

I did not buy any Dungeon Crawler Carl books, but these hardcover editions are appealing to my inner book-collector magpie; they’re big chonky bois in bright, appealing covers and I bet they’ll look great on the shelf. I also suspect they might be terrible? I dunno. Anyone read them?

My final purchase was this one:

This was actually the first book I physically touched after entering the store, as I saw it before the Twain book. I have not heard of the author, nor have I heard of his first book, and after flipping it over I realized that I have also not heard of any of the three authors with big pull quotes on the back, nor have I heard of any of the five books of theirs that were mentioned, and the quotes are genuinely wankstrous. Shit, this was probably a literature. I put it back.

Then, while looking for the Kamali book, I went back to the new fiction section to make sure it wasn’t still there, and … well, it turns out that Kamali and Larison are right next to each other on the shelf. So I picked it up again, leafed through it a bit, and put it back again.

Then, while deciding on The Outcast Mage, I decided that even though I’d had a vague plan to pick up three standalone books, and Outcast wasn’t one of those, I could still get it if I bought another standalone in addition to it, and somehow I ended up walking out of the store with The Ancients as well, figuring that this was a pretty precise example of how sometimes the books decide I’m buying them and not the other way around. I think this is the literary equivalent of being adopted by a cat. Hopefully I enjoy it.

I almost want to make this a separate post, but it is just my Barnes & Noble that is really hitting customer service and talking about books super hard, or is that a corporation-wide thing? Because the woman at the register was practically fucking interviewing the two people in front of me, making each transaction take so long that they had to call someone else to run a register because the line was building up. I was simultaneously stressing out about the conversation– what the hell is the name of the book I’m reading? Who is the author again?– and quietly scorning some of her choices, because I swear by God and sunny Jesus that if I walk up to you with a handful of fantasy books and you do what she did to the guy in front of me and ask if I’ve heard of Brandon fucking Sanderson, I may not be able to keep the look of disdain off of my face. She pivoted from “have you heard of the single most famous author in this genre in a generation” straight to recommending the Licanius trilogy by James Islington, making the second time in a row that I have been at that Barnes and Noble and someone has recommended those books, and I had the same reaction both times, which is that I usually don’t believe people when they tell me they’ve read them.

Also, there are like fifteen steps in fantasy book-reading between Brandon Sanderson and James Islington. It’s like finding out someone enjoys Goosebumps and recommending Lovecraft to them.

Anyway, the new register person ended up helping me, and did so without any unnecessary questions, which is good, because there was no way I was getting out of that conversation without some form of idiotic faux pas.

The end.

My mom says I’m funny

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

This was on my board on Friday, which was the last catch-up day until the final. I passed out progress reports at the beginning of class and went to my desk.

Spent the day running around town– as a family, no less– and getting stuff done and possibly spending some money unnecessarily. Then I came home and built a Lego set. I’m going to play video games for an hour now and then do some reading, so this is pretty much the perfect Saturday. We drove past a protest downtown, too, and the boy’s reaction to it makes me think I should probably take him to one sometime soon.

(I am … ambivalent, at best, about the utility of public protests, especially in 2025. That doesn’t mean that I look down at people for participating in them; I definitely don’t, but I don’t know that I find it a useful way to spend my time. There may be a post in there somewhere; I should probably interrogate the idea more.)

Anyway. What are you doing with yourself this weekend? I would like to officially plan as much of the next three weeks as humanly possible tomorrow, so spending the whole day at my desk is definitely possible.

My Boomer moment

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy1 Comment

My wife and I went to Best Buy last night– I tell you, date night has gotten really lazy lately– not because we particularly needed anything from there but because they’d sent me an email that I hadn’t used my card in a long enough time that they were going to close it out soon if I didn’t use it again. I don’t have any particular need for anything from them right now, but that card has come in handy plenty of times and there’s no reason to take a credit score hit in six months if we decide we need a dryer or a new TV or something. She wanted a new paper shredder, which we weren’t sure if they even carried, and I went in just intending to find literally anything I wanted, buy it on the card, leave, and immediately pay the card back off.(*)

This should have been easy.

I considered a few random things and then Bek found paper shredders and we decided to just grab one of those and call it a day. And we walked to the front of the store, where the registers have been for as long as this store has been there … and there were no registers.

We eventually noticed two signs hanging from the ceiling that said “Checkout,” both located in the middle of the fucking store, like we were in a fucking department store or something. One had no employees anywhere near it. The second just appeared to be a sign dangling randomly from the ceiling, with nothing at all to indicate where one might make a purchase. No kiosk, no computer, no self-checkout, nothing. And, again, in the middle of the fucking store. Why? Why the fuck is checkout in the middle of the store and not up by the doors?

The customer service desk was still there, clearly labeled for returns and Geek Squad and online pickup and such, but no signs for purchases, and the couple of employees behind that counter looked straight at me, a customer, clearly carrying a rather unwieldy box with the intent of purchasing, and didn’t, like, wave me over, or point me at where to go, or anything like that. We probably walked around, again, carrying merchandise, for five minutes, unable to figure out where to buy something in a fucking retail store that only exists to sell things, and at that point I decided I’d had enough, left the paper shredder on a random shelf and walked the fuck out of the store. On the way home we stopped at Target and bought a different paper shredder.

And, I gotta tell you, I didn’t believe any of this was happening while it was happening and I only barely believe it happened now. If it had just been me on the trip I’d just assume I was some variety of idiot and not worry about it. But my wife was with me, and she couldn’t figure out how the hell to give someone money in exchange for goods either, and that tells me I’m not fucking crazy. That said, I’ve been scouring the internet since then trying to find other people complaining about this and I can’t find any– there are tons of complaints about their website having issues but no one else saying I went into the story to make a purchase and couldn’t find the registers, which just … God, that just sounds insane. Selling things is the only reason the store exists. This cannot possibly have just happened. This isn’t an “I couldn’t find someone to unlock the case” situation. I had the thing I wanted in my hands and could not find a place to get someone to sell it to me.

What the fuck, Best Buy.

(*) The punch line to this fucking ridiculous story is that after hitting Publish on this post, I went and looked for the email, wondering what the deadline was and also trying to decide if I wanted to still keep the card (surely I can just order something online without drama, right? A PS5 gift card?) or just let it go … and I can’t find the email. My personal email is through Gmail. I have never deleted an email. So maybe I am completely nuts.

In which I’m in a better mood

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

My son’s best friend currently lives in Indianapolis, and she was in town overnight last night, and today we met her mom in Kokomo to hand her back over. For those of you who don’t know Indiana geography, Kokomo is more or less a halfway point between us, and it’s also the site of several cons I was a vendor at back when I was doing that. The guys who run Kokomo-Con have a comic shop, and two doors down from the comic shop is a fairly massive vintage toy shop, and a couple doors down from that is a used bookstore, with a used record store in between that we didn’t go into because I am not about to bring physical music media back into my life. We spent … I dunno, probably close to a couple of hours browsing between the three stores, and I somehow didn’t manage to spend any money despite finding any number of things I could have bought.

The copy of Iron Man #1 — the real first one, from 1968– was awfully tempting, especially since I’ve now spent some time looking through other listings for that same book and the $660 they wanted for it either indicates a hell of a deal or terrible condition. It wasn’t graded and obviously I didn’t take it off the shelf and look through it, but that’s always been a book I’ve wanted to own. If I was into Westerns I would have been ecstatic about the used bookstore, which had tons of series paperbacks that probably cost a quarter when they first came out. I always go looking for old Tor Conan books from the 1980s and early 90s and I can never find any, and it was the same here.

Three different $1000 Funko Pops. I don’t even remember what they were. That bubble’s got to … uh, pop soon, right?

Anyway, we came home and I took a nap until around 8, and now I’m up and if I wasn’t sitting here in front of the computer I’d be pacing around trying to decide if I wanted to do anything with the rest of my evening or go to bed. Spring Break is basically over at this point since we just have the weekend, and I have stuff to do on both days, so we’ll see if I’m a maniac on Sunday or if I manage to stay calm for the next couple of days. After that, seven weeks of school and then year 19 is in the bag.

Should be manageable.

First World Problems

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

This is not a post about my stupid YouTube channel, although I’m not gonna lie: it’s related. Part of the reason I started the channel with Little Nightmares II specifically is that LNII is a game that isn’t especially challenging on either my PS5 or my computer. I wanted to start off with Sekiro, but I couldn’t get the Elgato and the computer to play nice with each other, and any time I tried to stream or record anything complicated it came off really blurry and ugly with tons of frame drops and stuff like that. Little Nightmares II recorded very smoothly, so I figured I’d start with that, and then I embarked upon this ridiculous stream of minor and major upgrades to my system to get everything working the way I wanted. New HDMI cables were the first move– I have learned so much about cables in the last two weeks that it’s flat-out absurd. I had already been looking for an excuse to upgrade my desktop’s memory, since it shipped with only 8gb, so I fixed that next, upgrading to 40gb. When that didn’t make any difference, I spent last night researching the USB standard.

And … Christ.

Long story short: there are a mess of overlapping standards for USB, both the ports and the cables, and then there’s Apple’s own answer to USB, which is the Thunderbolt standard, and even that has a couple of different versions out there. As it works out, my computer has a spare Thunderbolt port available, which supposedly can push 40gb a second? That’s … a lot, so I decided to upgrade the USB cable today.

And I don’t think the story’s funny enough to recount in full, but doing that required the following steps:

  • Ordering a proper 6′ cable from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
  • Ordering the same cable in 3′ length from Target to pick up in-store, then getting an email an hour later that they didn’t have the cable after all, sorry about that;
  • Ordering a 6′ cable from Staples to pick up in-store, then buying it and noticing in the parking lot that it was clearly not the right cable, as it advertised “up to” 500mb per second, and I don’t know how much you know about computer measurements but 40gb is literally eighty times faster than that;
  • Deciding I did not have the willpower to return the cable today (I’ll do it tomorrow) and checking Target again to see if they had a specifically Thunderbolt cable, as I realized that that was going to be something completely different;
  • Getting a yes, according to their website;
  • Going to Target and discovering that 1) they did have the cable I wanted; 2) the cable I wanted wasn’t the cable I wanted, as Apple sells both a USB-C male-male cable that isn’t rated for Thunderbolt speeds and one that is, and that one of those is called a USB-C cable and the other is called a Thunderbolt (USB-C) cable;
  • Ordering one from the Apple store on the other side of town for pick up in-store, then realizing they want appointments for in-store pick up and calling the store to 1) make sure they had the cable before driving across town and 2) making sure that I can actually come get the damn thing before my appointment, because I was doing all this while the boy was at camp and the earliest available appointment was right when I’d have to be picking him up;
  • Driving to the mall and picking up my cable, and then getting home and having just enough time to make sure it worked and did what I wanted it to before having to go pick the boy up. I’m quite happy to report that it looks like I’m going to be able to stream and/or record basically anything I want now, although there’s still some weird color issues with Sekiro that I haven’t figured out yet.

Slightly separate issue: the Apple store also has curbside pick-up, and in fact has designated parking spots in the mall parking lot for same, but the Apple store itself is deep enough inside the mall that getting to it from (I think) the closest available external door(*) is a 5-minute walk. Not a lot in the long term, but I wouldn’t want to be the employee who got tasked with spending all fucking day lugging shit from the store to those two parking spots. Not without, like, a Segway or something like that. It’s not remotely as hot here as it is in a lot of the country (particularly the West Coast) right now, but it’s about as humid as I’ve ever experienced, and that would be an “I quit” moment real quick for me, particularly since you know those curbside pick-up people are going to be impatient as hell.

(*) I mean, it would have to be, right? That’s where the parking spaces were. Surely they wouldn’t put their designated curbside spots next to the second closest door, although that might be giving mall management too much credit.

In which I had something for this

On By Luther M. SilerIn life1 Comment

I’m on at least three post ideas for today so far, and by “post ideas” I mean I came up with something, thought “Okay, that’s today’s post,” and then promptly forgot what the hell it was before I had a chance to put it into writing. So that’s how my day is going so far.

I did manage to get my work tasks squared away early today, by not bothering with the instructional video (tomorrow’s material is the same as today’s, so rather than recording something myself I just linked to someone else’s) and getting the assignment written while working in the Meet and doing other things. Sometimes it’s kinda fun to yell “give me a number!” at a half-dozen kids and then write a math problem about it.

I’m also reaching that point in the week– and it’s alarming to realize that it’s only Tuesday– where my eyes could definitely benefit from doing less staring at screens for a little while.

Actually, there’s this, which I think was one of the things: I had to go to my local Ace Hardware to buy a flagpole earlier, because I’m finally getting around to putting the pride flag in front of my house that I have wanted to put up since last June. And, y’all, we need to protect our retail workers, okay? Because the item I bought ended up not being in their system for some reason, and it took all of five whole minutes before the manager finally shrugged and charged me for a slightly different flagpole (which, whatever; I hadn’t even looked for a price, I just grabbed the one I wanted and headed to the counter) and I think during that five minutes I was apologized to for my incredibly minor inconvenience at least a dozen times by at least three or four different people. And you could just tell that everybody was waiting for me to completely lose my shit about it, and it’s like … yeah, I have so many more important things to worry about right now than this that I don’t even have the energy to reach “this is not your fault but I’m annoyed anyway” level annoyed. Oh, darn, I had to wait five whole minutes.

And you just know that these folks have gotten the shit kicked out of them recently about something similar, right? Because motherfuckers have allowed themselves to get completely out of control lately, and while filming these fools and putting it on the Internet has gotten rather popular I think it might be time to start upgrading to actual intervention. Nobody should be this nervous about this minor of a thing, and it wasn’t just the cashier, it was everyone I encountered in the store.

The flag’s gonna look nice, by the way. We’ve taken it down already to get the folds pressed out, but I hung it up long enough to take a picture, which the wind promptly made twice as complicated as it needed to be. But nonetheless: