Station Identification, Nov. 5 2022

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

This used to be a whole thing that I did every week, and I got out of the habit several years ago, when it stopped being as important to me that everyone who follows me here also follows me everywhere else. However, I figure that what with the entire social media universe in complete upheaval at the moment, it’s probably useful to start doing it again at least occasionally.

Note that my Linktree has convenient links to literally every single one of these places if you’d like to just click on that and save yourself trouble, but I’m going to go through everything anyway.

  • The big one is my blog, infinitefreetime.com, and you’re already here unless you’re looking at this through some sort of RSS thing, and I don’t even know if you can do that. The blog turns 10 next year, I own it, and while I go through periods of more and less frequent posting, I’m not going anywhere, and coming here will be the most reliable place to find me for the foreseeable future.
  • Second most-active is my YouTube gaming channel, lutherplaysgames.com. I almost shut this down once and then decided against it, and right now I’m back to having fun with it. It’s also the account that I’m most interested in growing, so if you aren’t subscribed you really should go click on it. You’ve got a YouTube account already even if you’re not using it so you may as well subscribe to me. 🙂
  • I still have ten thousand followers on Twitter and still post there regularly, although that follower count has dropped by a few hundred this week due to Shenanigans. Be aware that my Twitter is considerably more profane and more political than my presence here, if that’s something that might bother you, although I also do a lot of book discovery over there. I will genuinely miss Twitter if it dies.
  • I don’t post on TikTok as often as I used to but I’m still reasonably active over there and it’s still a huge Goddamn time sink.
  • Everyone should follow me on Goodreads even though I don’t use the social features there at all. Just, like, do it. I have 712 friends over there and they all found me. I don’t know anywhere near 712 people.
  • I just started a Discord server today, just for the hell of it. There’s really nothing there at the moment but that link will allow anyone to join if they want, assuming I set it up correctly.
  • OKAY THIS ONE I’M SERIOUS ABOUT: I just started playing with Duolingo recently and while it’s not quite a social media network, if you’re using it I’d love some more friends. Right now I’m doing Spanish, Japanese, Arabic and Welsh simultaneously and I’m enjoying the hell out of myself.
  • I have also started accounts on Mastodon and Tribel, and right now I don’t know a Goddamn thing about either of them and Tribel in particular looks like it’s going to be something I quickly walk away from, but those seem to be the two most common destinations for Twitter refugees at the moment so I’m giving them a shot. If you’re over there, hit me up.

So. Yeah. Follow me! On all the things! And if there are other places I should be checking out, let me know!

On the news

Luther M. Siler5 Comments

I don’t know, as I’m typing this, whether this will end up being a thousand-word post or two paragraphs, because I really don’t know how much I want to talk about this and I won’t know until I start typing. So here we go: I do not intend to watch a single second of the hearings about the January 6th insurrection tonight, nor do I plan to watch them in the future, and in fact I’m not even sure how many days of hearings are currently scheduled. There is nothing– nothing— that these hearings can actually teach me about what happened that day; as near as I can tell all the committee has managed to do is confirm stuff that was perfectly fucking obvious from the day it happened. Of course the shitstain knew what was happening. Of course the highest echelons of the Republican Party were involved in planning it. The closest thing to a surprising detail I’ve heard in the last six months was that Pence’s staff knew that he was in danger, and Pence is such an indescribable coward that he has continued to cling to this wretched creature anyway.

Fuck it. Fuck all of it. I spend all day every day angry and I’m not going to deliberately add to it. I’m just not going to do it.

What I will do, of course, is keep an eye on fucking Twitter, which will no doubt keep me appraised of everything happening in the most anger-inducing manner possible. Or maybe I’ll just turn everything off and shoot Nazis all night again. I am a hundred percent not alone in this, but I would love to find a way to balance knowing enough about what is going on in the world to be able to consider myself an informed citizen with shutting off the absolute fucking fire-hose torrent of horror and evil the world has become. I can feel myself becoming Col. Kurtz over here, y’all, and no one needs that. Least of all me.

I’m going to shoot Nazis to bleed off some stress and then I’m going to watch the first episode of Ms. Marvel, and hopefully I’ll be able to do that without thinking about how fucking awful most of the people who share my hobbies are. We’ll see.

In which I’m not going anywhere yet

Luther M. Siler4 Comments

I didn’t mean for this to work this way, but this headline is doubly appropriate: first, because despite Elon Musk’s attempt to buy Twitter, I don’t plan to immediately flee the service. I didn’t like Jack either, and actually I don’t know who the hell runs the place now, so it’s not like I’ve ever personally approved of whoever was at the top of the corporate ladder at the place. Musk’s ownership probably won’t become official for six months or so (and isn’t guaranteed,) and I’m not about to flee a place where I have nearly eleven thousand followers and something like fifteen years of history without a better reason.

Like, for example, “I hate it there.” I might leave Twitter because I hate Twitter. But not because of Musk. Not, at least, until he starts changing things. Then we’ll see.

Also, speaking of things that aren’t happening, I have officially not gotten the only job I have managed to get an interview for since I started applying to jobs a couple of months ago. And … honestly, whatever. I’m not bothered by it. They ended up going with someone with coding experience, which I always knew was a weak spot in my application, and if you’ve been following along lately you know I was lukewarm on the job at best anyway. I still don’t especially want to return to my current school in the fall, but I’m far from convinced that this would have been an improvement.

Are we sure it’s only Tuesday, by the way? Is there any chance that it’s Thursday right now? Because this has been an insanely long two days, and I really don’t like having my worst class at the very end of the day.

Let’s see how long this lasts

Luther M. Siler3 Comments

I have deleted TikTok, Twitter and Tweetbot— yes, I had two different apps just for Twitter– from my phone. My plan is to leave them gone for a week; my hope is that I can make it through my coffee tomorrow morning. My phone rather helpfully asked me if I wanted to cancel my $5.99 yearly subscription to Tweetbot, which I actually declined; it re-ups next week, which kind of entertains me.

I’m trying to cut down on the amount of free-floating dread and hate I have in my life, you see. Twitter is a prime contributor to this, although TikTok definitely has its moments, and although I feel like both services are useful to me in certain ways– Twitter, in particular, is the source of most of my news nowadays– I just need a detox for a while. I need free-floating existential dread to have less of a death-grip on my brain and every time I open Twitter up I am reminded how fucking awful everything is.

Note that I’m not even going cold turkey on the service– I literally have it open on my second monitor as I’m typing this, the second monitor that I have on my desk more or less specifically for Twitter. I’m just keeping it off my phone, to cut down on those moments where I realize I’ve lost an hour to mindless scrolling. I mean, hell, I’ve stopped typing this post three or four times because something shiny scrolled by, so maybe I’ll ditch that too. But baby steps, right? Right.

Nattering about video games

Luther M. Siler

First of all: I reviewed Hoa when I first played it– spoiler alert, I really liked it– but I promised to link to the Let’s Play when it was up and I never did. So here it is; all five episodes are live so if you have some time to watch, feel free. Hit that subscribe button, too.

Second, it’s weird how this whole YouTube thing has affected the way I actually play video games. This is not at all surprising, but I find it interesting anyway. To be more specific: a game I did a Let’s Play series for just released some new (free) DLC, and I don’t know how to play it, if that makes any sense. Before, I’d just play it or not. Now, I’m going back and forth between doing regular episodes, a livestream where I just run through the whole thing, or– crazy, I know– possibly just playing it off-camera, y’know, like a normal person.

(Looks it up, discovers it requires a fresh playthrough to be done right, decides not to play at all)

Still, though.

In related news, I’m playing Far Cry 6 right now, and that’s set in the “real” world, so to speak, and so features licensed music whenever you enter a vehicle. I uploaded a bunch of new episodes yesterday and immediately got hit with a ton of more-or-less bullshit copyright claims, but the way YouTube arbitrates copyright claims puts all the power in the hands of the people claiming that you’re violating your copyright. Now, granted, I’m hundreds and hundreds of followers away from monetizing the channel and will probably lose interest well before it gets that big, but it annoys me that there could be a 13-second clip of a song that was licensed to the game in my video because I jumped into a car for a few seconds and because of that these folks feel like they’re entitled to all of the revenue that video might generate, as if those thirteen seconds are the fucking reason people are watching the half-hour video. It’s horseshit. I’ve turned off the radio option for any further episodes I record so this won’t be happening again, but I’m thinking about re-editing the videos that have claims on them just to pre-empt any future bullshit. The way I record preserves my commentary and the game audio in separate files, so it would take some time to do but in terms of the actual work involved it would be pretty trivial to snip the songs out. We’ll see if my appeals go through or not.

Bathroom work is proceeding apace. Not as exciting today as yesterday, but I’ll post pictures later anyway.