The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
Not really, actually— l have spent most of tonight in a towering rage that I have not been able to shake. Everything is pissing me off and I can’t do the sensible thing and just stay off of the one social media account I have left because it’s the main contributor to the free-floating anger.
I wonder what being an emotionally intelligent adult might be like? I should try it.
One thing I miss about the YouTube channel is that if I got buried in work and Baldur’s Gate III for a couple of days and forgot the rest of the world existed, at least videos would be showing up to confirm that I was still alive.
Also, I don’t know if I ever announced this, but I’m off damn near everything now. My sole remaining accounts are here, GoodReads, and TikTok. Everything else has been shut down. Technically I suppose I have a Discord account but I only interact with one community and it’s closed, so it doesn’t really count.
Anyway. Did I mention disappearing into video games? Because the PS5 is calling again.
I shut down both my Twitter account and my YouTube channel yesterday; Twitter for no doubt obvious reasons and the YouTube because frankly it was getting to be too much damn work for too little return and I was feeling guilty over playing Diablo and not recording it, which is ridiculous. We’ve also been working hard around the house for the last several days and I’m tired and achy and haven’t been in the mood for posting. Other than that, nothing is wrong, do not panic.
And let me know if you want a Bluesky invite; that’s where most of my non-here energy is going lately. I don’t actually have any at this exact second but if anyone wants one I can let you know the next time one pops up on my account.
I have created an account at Bluesky— you can find me over there at @infinitefreetime.bsky.social— and so far I’m enjoying the place. It’s Twitter, basically; most of the differences are on the back end where the end-user is never going to see or notice them, and the main thing is that Elon Fucking Musk doesn’t own it. I’m trying to reconstruct my Twitter lists as much as possible; the lack of actual verification is a bit of a problem right now but since it’s still a small service and invite-only, impersonators aren’t really an issue. Hopefully it stays that way. I don’t have any invites yet, but if I happen to get a bunch I’ll let people know.
I drove to Indianapolis and back yesterday (well, went to Indianapolis round-trip; my wife did the driving on the home leg) came home, took a nap, and then that was pretty much my day. Today was the second day in a row my blood sugar level has gotten low enough to kick my ass and both times there have had to be naps afterward. I have a doctor’s appointment in a couple of weeks and I’m really hoping that she agrees to let me have a continuous glucose monitor because I’m tired of poking holes in my fingertips. I’ve mostly got my numbers under control right now– mostly through eating better– but getting low really sucks and the idea that a CGM warns you that it’s heading that way before you feel it really sounds like a good thing.
My birthday is the 5th. Buy me something. I’m going to be 47, and Christ, 47 feels old in a way 46 really didn’t.
Speaking of 47, now I’m looking at this and my brain is melting because I know I had a couple more things I wanted to talk about — Oh! I have officially been gifted a Prone Pillow, and it ought to be here in a few days, so you can look forward to that. I’ve been sent plenty of free books and ARCs over the ten years I’ve been doing this blog but I think this is the first time anyone has sent me any other kind of consumer goods to review. I have to admit to being slightly ashamed of myself– I wrote the dude back to say that I thought it was ridiculous for him to say my blog’s demographics were a “perfect match” for his product when I didn’t know my site’s demographics, and he pointed out that I’m an author and therefore my blog probably has a lot of people who like reading looking at it, and reading while lying on your stomach is one of the major use cases for his pillow.
Uh, yeah, that’s … that, uh, makes sense, and … uh … I’m kinda dumb sometimes okay shut up. Anyway, it’ll be here Friday or thereabouts so expect a review next week sometime.
I still feel like I’m forgetting something, but that’s what editing is for. Try not to blow any body parts off tomorrow, y’all.
I suppose technically I’ve posted today, since yesterday’s post just went up (oops) but seeing as how I need two episodes to finish uploading to YouTube before I can do anything serious involving my computer I may as well go ahead and write the post I was going to post.
If I can remember what the hell it was going to be about, that is.
I nearly Tweeted tonight. I removed Twitter, Mastodon, Instagram and TikTok from my phone a couple of weeks (?) ago in a fit of social media hatred, leaving only a single Discord server to represent social media on my phone. I reinstalled TikTok a couple of days ago because my wife has been out of town and I was bored but I’m already tired of it and about to take it off again. My wife is back in town again as of this morning, so we’re starting to return to normal around here, which is good. I haven’t necessarily missed interacting with people on Twitter, but occasionally a thought occurs to me that I want to throw out into the void and I lack a place for stray thoughts at the moment.
(Yes, I know that not every stray thought I have needs to be shared with the world. Sure. I know. Still.)
At any rate, I deleted the proto-Tweet unsent.
Friday featured one of my girls telling one of my boys, with a fair degree of certainty in her voice, that yes, she did have a scrotum, and that it was in her lower back, just like everyone else’s. I pulled her over to my desk and explained the difference between an scrotum and a sacrum to her, and a few minutes later had to ban further use of the word scrotum by any of my students, whether they possessed one or not.
Ah, middle school.
I think at this point it’s safe to say that I have rid myself of Twitter. The blog is still cross posting there and I check in once a day but I’m not posting there any longer.
What, do you think, will it take to be quit of TikTok?
Let’s navel-gaze about our social media for a bit, shall we?
The kids discovered my Discord server today. What, you didn’t know I had a Discord server? There’s a reason for that! I never use it. I set it up, and I spend a decent amount of time on an Internet writer friend’s server, but mine just kind of existed because it could. They found it anyway. We had an e-learning day today, with the kids at home and the teachers in the building, and happened to glance at Discord on my lunch break to discover dozens of students, most of my Honors kids, merrily chatting it up in my server, secure in the knowledge that I hadn’t found them yet because they knew I was at work, the little bastards.
A number of things happened very fast– first, renaming the server to remove the word “Siler,” then putting my own name on a list of blocked words– or, rather, making my name the entire list of blocked words– and then rapidly introducing a set of Official Rules that hadn’t been there before because there hadn’t been people there before. Technically the kids aren’t really doing anything wrong, especially once I introduced the Thou Shalt Not Use Each Other’s Last Names and Thou Shalt Not Post Selfies, For Thou Art Minors rules, and now I mostly need to find out if I’m going to get fired if the district finds out about it.
Which strikes me– I’ve never seen any sort of district social media policy, nor was I asked to sign one when I got hired. I actually thought that was a pretty common thing for school districts nowadays, but if we have one I don’t know about it. I’ll have to ask the boss tomorrow. I’ve told the kids they’re on probation– any shenanigans, tomfoolery or other synonyms for nonsense and I’ll either ban everybody or just shut the server down, which, again, I wasn’t using anyway. On the other hand, so long as they’re behaving, it’s a public server and they’re members of the public, so … whatever? I don’t even know who, specifically, 2/3 of them are. I dunno. We’ll see.
This is further evidence of how careful I need to be to keep my social media cleanly split between accounts that use the word “Siler”– the blog, Twitter, and Mastodon, although I’m not using Mastodon a ton just yet– and the ones that just call me Luther, which would be TikTok, Discord (now, at least, as they didn’t appear to notice when I renamed the server) and YouTube. I very much am not interested in them finding my blog or my Twitter, in particular, although I think if any of them had taken it into their heads to Google “Luther Siler,” they’d have done it by now and I’d have heard about it. So I think I’ve dodged that particular bullet, at least for the moment, and if I make it through tomorrow I think I’m in the clear, since we’re on another damn e-learning day and I fully expect them to spend the whole day on my Discord again. Hopefully by next week they’ll lose interest and I won’t have to worry about it one way or another. We’ll see.