Some random thoughts and also I build a toy

On July 28, 2016July 28, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Stories2 Comments

Stayed up last night and livetweeted the convention up to the point where Tim Kaine’s speech finished; I’m always amazed that I don’t have a ton of unfollows during these things, as I tend to tweet a lot when I’m watching anything remotely political. But no! Only six people all day yesterday, which is a perfectly normal number. I ended up liking Tim Kaine more than I thought I would– a thought that I think my Twitter feed shared. There was a lot of making fun of him going on but it felt affectionate, if that makes any sense, and dude has succeeded in making his stupid Donald Trump impression worm its way into my brain– meaning that every time the idiot says “believe me” again, people are going to hear Kaine doing it. He’s like Ned Sanders, but with a really sharp knife, the kind where you don’t realize anyone cut you until your head falls off. I still would have preferred several other options, but I’m starting to think I can get to like this guy.

Anyway it’s my day off and I decided to build the Millennium Falcon. Legos have gotten fucking complicated, guys.

That’s a lot of bags. They are labeled 1-8, but several numbers have more than one bag, some of the bags have other bags inside them, and one bag has no number on it at all. There’s maybe 12 outer bags. That is one big-assed instruction manual. I got through about 90 pages of it before deciding I’d had enough for the morning.

This is the part where I realized I’d screwed up for the first time, as you really need to pay attention to the colors in the instruction manuals and the right pieces were inexplicably in the unlabeled bag. At any rate, you start by building the superstructure of the thing and I made mine too short.

There, that’s better. As it worked out, this was my only big mistake, or at least the only one I’ve noticed so far. The engineers for these things are crazy people and the people who make the manuals are crazy geniuses.

Adding the floor.Finishing the first step of the build with some work on the underside. This is crazily complicated already. All of this was the first bag, by the way. On to the second bag. We’re making progress! The end of Bag Two, which was mostly furniture and detail stuff. Also, I got to put in some decals.

The end of Bag Three. Which, weirdly, doesn’t look all that different from Bag Two at first, until you look a little closer.

And here’s the end of Bag Four, putting me halfway through the build. At this point I realized my eyes were bleeding and decided to be done for a bit. There are at least two more minifigures in the bags somewhere, because I haven’t found Rey or BB-8 yet. The first four bags took about two hours, so I’ll probably end up finishing this tomorrow. Whee!

My belated birthday present

On July 23, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

My brother and new sister in law know me very well, it seems:

On hills, and the dying thereupon

On May 11, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Parenting2 Comments

I watched The Force Awakens with my son for the first time a few weeks ago. Since then we’ve watched it once or twice more and a curious pattern has arisen: every time, and I mean every God Damned time, Kylo Ren appears on screen, the boy asks who he is.

“Kylo Ren,” I say.

“Oh,” he says, then he waits until his next scene and asks again. If he wasn’t four I’d be certain he was trolling me. This has, lately, extended to toys as well; we were in Target the other day and he picked up a Ren figure and asked me who it was.

I generally walk into school with him at Hogwarts and escort him to his classroom; it’s not entirely necessary but he enjoys it and there’s no good reason not to do it. After he drops off his stuff at his cubby there’s a plastic box he’s supposed to put his lunch and snack into and take with him to the classroom. The kids have all decorated theirs with stickers, and I think the teachers use cubby-stickers for minor rewards. He always shows me when he has a new sticker. And the other day there was a Kylo Ren sticker on his mailbox.

“Look!” he says. “It’s Skylo Ren!”

“Kylo Ren,” I say.

“No,” he says. “That’s Skylo Ren.”

I swear, you could hear my teeth grinding from the moon for a brief moment.

“It’s Kylo,” I said. “It’s been Kylo every single time you’ve asked for weeks. Which one of us can read, again?”

“Mrs. McGonagall says it’s Skylo,” he says, as if that settles the issue. I think Mrs. McGonagall is the gym teacher, maybe?

“Mrs. McGonagall is wrong,” I say. “His name is Kylo Ren. K-Y-L-O.”

“Skylo,” he says. He’s getting loud and insistent. I drop it, until the next time I am with him in a store and see a Kylo Ren toy, at which point I force him to spell the name to me and, after doing so, he asks who the toy is.

I give up.

They have been studying birds in class, for what seems like weeks, and the boy has acquired a legitimately impressive store of facts about ornithology. We are putting him to bed, and I walk into his bedroom as my wife is giving him a hug and he, in his way, is explaining to her that cowbirds put their eggs in the nests of other birds because they are lazy.

My wife is a biologist. I actually see her eyes twitch.

“Who told you that?” she says.

“Mrs. Dumbledore,” he says. Mrs. Dumbledore is actually his teacher.

“That’s not quite true,” she says. “It’s actually an evolutionary strategy–”

He interrupts. “Lazy!”

There is another twitch.

I watch my wife be dragged unwillingly down a road where she actually uses the phrase brood parasitism in a conversation with a four-year-old. There is a large smile on my face, and eventually the boy wins again. Okay. Fine. Skylo Ren. Lazy cowbirds.

We give up.

Star Wars Day giveaway!

On May 4, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Writing4 Comments

It’s May the 4th! The Sanctum of the Sphere and Skylights are both free for a couple of days! Go get ’em! And May the Fourth be with you!

(IN OTHER NEWS: laid out by a sudden-onset migraine last night. Right now my left eye is trying to convince me that it can’t see. It can. It’s a really weird feeling.)

On things I’ve watched lately

On April 7, 2016April 7, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek3 Comments

Let’s start with this bit of awesome:

You may recall that I wasn’t as enamored as I wanted to be with the first couple of FORCE AWAKENS trailers, worrying that it was going to hit the wrong tone and be too scary for my son– who, incidentally, I’m trying to watch FORCE AWAKENS with as I’m typing this.

This, on the other hand? This movie, which I would have told you yesterday was entirely unnecessary?

Super fucking psyched. I mean, there’s not a lot here– it’s a teaser, after all– but what’s in there is awesome. Maybe Forrest Whitaker is a little distracting, but he vanishes into roles so I’m sure it won’t be an issue in the movie. The two things I like the most? The music– we finally have a hint of what a post-John Williams STAR WARS might look like– and the fact that they apparently reached into the past to grab whoever is playing the younger Mon Mothma. But… yeah. Right now, I like everything about this.

Mild DAREDEVIL and WALKING DEAD spoilers in the next two parts. Nothing too huge.

I was not the world’s biggest fan of the first season of DAREDEVIL– roundly despising the portrayal of the season’s big villain will do that– but I was much, much happier with the second season. Jon Bernthal as the Punisher and Elodie Yung as Elektra were fantastic, the relationships between the three main characters (Matt, Foggy and Karen) made a lot more sense in Season 2 than in Season 1, and the show was just overall better than in the first season. I was hoping to get an entire season free of the Kingpin and didn’t, and he was no better in his brief appearance in Season 2 than in Season 1, but I have few if any other complaints other than occasional bouts of silliness here and there and there being way too many ninjas in New York. If you didn’t watch the first season, you’ll be fine without it (Kingpin was the bad guy. They got him. Done.) and if you liked the first season you really should have seen this already.

I think my feelings about the Season Six finale of THE WALKING DEAD can best be expressed with a panel from the comic:

Honestly, here’s the funny thing: I was really pissed about this when it happened, and now, a few days later, I just don’t care any longer. They can kill whoever the hell they want; it doesn’t really matter to me.

I suspect that’s not the emotional reaction the show was going for, honestly.

DARTH MAUL: APPRENTICE

On March 6, 2016March 6, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, movies8 Comments

This is outstanding and you should watch it right now:

(If it doesn’t work, go here.)

On what I’m like

On January 5, 2016January 5, 2016 By Luther M. SilerIn Geek5 Comments

Allow the following to be a minor insight into my personality. This is a portion of my desk:

Take note: Finn, Rey, a Stormtrooper, Kylo Ren, and Phasma. That’s all the figures from this current film that I own; let’s not talk about the other movies. I bought all of these before seeing THE FORCE AWAKENS. Since then I’ve been considering demoting the Stormtrooper and Phasma to some other location in the house (or possibly, in fact more likely, a box somewhere) and I’ve been tossing around the idea of grabbing a Poe Dameron figure, since Poe is one of the few 3 3/4″ figures you can actually count on finding nowadays.

Just the other day it hit me: if I found a Poe, I could put him right next to Finn, and I could probably contrive a way to make the figures hold hands. And then it became undeniable: I had to have a Poe Dameron for my desk.

I had a few errands to run and found one at Target just now. This is what the Poe figure that matches the rest of these look like:

That helmet is molded on. It can’t be removed. And I didn’t buy the figure, because if I’m going to get into yaoi shipping on my desk, I’m damn well gonna be able to look both of the toys in the eyes while I do it.

(It has come to my attention while working on this post that there is another slightly more expensive Poe figure that is the same size, but not wearing a helmet. In fact, he’s wearing the same jacket my Finn is wearing, which is even better. So I’m now on a hunt for that one.)

And, while we’re talking about toys, I don’t own any of the Disney Infinity games, and in fact I’ve been doing my damnedest to not ever get sucked into it, but if I ever find this in a store I’m buying it anyway:

Because awesome.

That is all.

On Rey and Mary Sue and FORCE AWAKENS and Twitter and fanfic and awesome

On December 21, 2015December 21, 2015 By Luther M. SilerIn movies, Politics, Writing2 Comments

The following chunk of paragraph, which does not itself actually contain any spoilers, appears in my spoiler review of Star Wars: The Force Awakens:

Hello, Daisy Ridley! Lemme be clear here: Rey is the best thing about this movie. Period. She is my favorite Star Wars character. She is so awesome that she borders on being a Mary Sue. Hell, she probably is a Mary Sue. I just don’t care.

It is clear, I hope, that I have an enormous amount of enthusiasm for this character, and she is never described in anything less than glowing terms throughout the review, or the non-spoiler one that came before it. I was rather taken aback yesterday afternoon to discover a raging argument happening on Twitter about whether or not Rey was a Mary Sue, and about all the sexist assholes who were describing her as such.

Here’s the thing: I had looked up the term before I used it, because it’s not something I say a lot. And other than not finding herself in a romantic relationship with the more-famous male leads, she fits. She’s literally incredibly good at everything she does throughout the entire movie. Do I care? No, not a bit, and if you want it a bit more clear why I’d suggest you read the spoiler review, as I don’t intend to be spoilery here.

But yeah. Twitter was mad, and a certain subset of Twitter who I try to listen to very carefully before/if deciding that they’re wrong (I try to be careful, as a man, about deciding “nope, I’m not being a sexist here, and the women are wrong”) was mad too.

Thing is, they were saying things like WOULD YOU EVER SAY LUKE OR ANAKIN WERE MARY SUES? WHAT ABOUT RAMBO? OR BLAHBLAH HAMMER?

And my answer to that was no, yes, yes, and who? in that order, and furthermore I don’t really have any ego bound up in this term. Call whoever you want a Mary Sue. I might debate you on it a bit, but I ain’t gonna get mad about it. Luke, for example? Nah, at least not in ANH; he’s whiny and gets his butt kicked in Mos Eisley, he’s not (ever) actually portrayed as a particularly exceptional pilot, has no particular technical skills, and while he does hit that exhaust port when Wedge (one person) failed, he treats it less as something amazing that he could do than something that ought to be easy (“I used to bullseye womp rats in my T-46 back home; they’re not much bigger than 2 meters.”).

Anakin? Rambo? Sure. Fine. I don’t care. I’ve never even heard of the Hammer dude who kept getting tossed around but everyone was certain that I’d be mad hearing him called a Mary Sue. Whatever. This is not something I’m willing to fight about. I don’t like being accused of sexism, especially when I think it’s wrong, but there are also times where I’m more interested in brushing off my shoulders and moving on with my life than bravely mounting my horse and riding off to defend the castle, and this needed to be one of those times.

Anyway.

Yesterday evening, this time speaking with people who I “know” a lot better and who have more or less the same reach on Twitter than I do, I actually did get into a fruitful and interesting conversation about whether Rey was a Mary Sue or not, one that is going to lead to me leaving the phrase in the review but probably just avoiding it altogether in the future. And then this happened:

(Screw the HTML; I just ended up screencapping it, but here’s a link to the Storify anyway.) The long and short of it is I got somebody to write Benevolence Archives/Star Wars fanfic, and it is the greatest thing ever.