Tag: writing

Oh, why not

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reading, Reviews5 Comments

I started a book the other day, a big doorstoppy, mouse-killer of a book, one I’d been really looking forward to reading, and I made it six percent of the way through the book before deciding I could not tolerate another second of it and put it down.

Then I looked at the reviews online, because I’m dumb like that, and they’re rapturous. And I’m gaslighting myself because, come on, this is objectively not a good book. There are errors of word choice and tense and the dialogue is abominable and the main character is way way way too into ogling high school girls for someone about to exit college. Today I thought about writing a review of the book, because I can’t believe people think this book is as good as they’re saying it is and I need the world to stop gaslighting me. So I went through on my Kindle, reread the first 6%, and annotated it.

Yes, I’m exactly that petty.

The problem is there were over sixty annotations– which, on one hand, I said the book was awful, but on the other hand, properly fisking this mess has become a lot of work, especially since when you export Kindle notes all it gives you is the note; it doesn’t include the bit you highlighted for the note. And, sure, I can do a bunch of screenshots, or copy and paste, and I probably don’t have to include all sixty of the notes, but that felt like a lot of work.

So what I’m going to do instead is just paste in my notes, obscuring the author’s name when necessary (although you’ll recognize the book, if you’ve read it) and y’all can tell me if you think this is worth the extra work. I will make this sacrifice for my people if you want me to. Obviously some of these are going to be obscure since you don’t see what I’m referring to, but … well, there are gonna be some patterns.

Anyway, enjoy:

Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1045
Much like the House of Lannister.

Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1046
Dumb

Note – One > Page 3 · Location 1050
Eew.

Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1063
Definitely start by sexualizing the first teenage girl in the book.

Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1064
She’s literally just glancing at her own shirt.

Note – One > Page 4 · Location 1071
Is this a thing sisters do? Grope each other?

Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1085
Note, for now, that AUTHOR is willing to spell out “dyke.”

Note – One > Page 5 · Location 1092
The hoodie is going to turn into a zip-up later.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1096
No one talks like this. Also, there’s no universe where Steven Biko can be mistaken for Eddie Murphy.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1098
Again, no one talks like this.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1099
As opposed to the other guard.

Note – One > Page 6 · Location 1104
Makes no sense for her to be upset.

Note – Two > Page 7 · Location 1114
“gangly” means “long-limbed”; no reason to use both words.

Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1125
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 8 · Location 1139
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1152
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 9 · Location 1157
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 10 · Location 1168
Biko is on the *back* of the hoodie, which is now a sweatshirt.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1181
Definitely something you yell at your daughter in jail. 

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1184
Just weirdly phrased.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1190
Try and imagine this scenario for a second. Like, physically do it with your body. This is not a possible thing.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1191
In the previous paragraph, she fell backwards over a chair and … landed on her nose? How?

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1194
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 11 · Location 1195
Weird word choice.

Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1200
No reason for the word “own” here.

Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1203
No one talks like this.

Note – Two > Page 12 · Location 1205
It’s a hoodie again.

Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1215
Weird.

Note – Three > Page 13 · Location 1218
No one talks like this.

Note – Three > Page 14 · Location 1229
Awkward phrasing.

Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1246
Colin could use a pronoun.

Note – Three > Page 15 · Location 1257
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 16 · Location 1268
These girls will never be mentioned again.

Note – Four > Page 17 · Location 1276
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1296
And now it’s a zipup. It’s been a regular hoodie and a sweatshirt and now it’s a zipup.

Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1302
… is her skin moldy?

Note – Four > Page 18 · Location 1304
Why? Who randomly starts eating a sandwich in front of people? Why didn’t he eat before he went to get the hoodie, which he thought was just in a car? 

Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1311
This is the weirdest goddamn way to threaten somebody. Burned? Is it a plastic spoon?

Note – Four > Page 19 · Location 1317
Her face is in her pillow but the “shiv” is below her eye? How did they get these photos smuggled out of the prison?

Note – Four > Page 20 · Location 1343
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 21 · Location 1361
I feel like burning sixty grand worth of PCP in a woodstove would at least create a noticeable smell, maybe one cops might notice, but I dunno.

Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1370
It’s 1989. Pre-Internet. These idiots do not have contacts to sell rare manuscripts. No.

Note – Four > Page 22 · Location 1377
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1384
No one talks like this.

Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1386
Glad that everyone has time to appreciate the “satisfying” sound of broken glass during this extortion attempt.

Note – Four > Page 23 · Location 1390
Unnecessary.

Note – Five > Page 24 · Location 1400
Twenty-foot doors are very large doors.

Note – Five > Page 25 · Location 1422
Again, to who?

Note – Five > Page 27 · Location 1452
All of this was in the newspaper article? Including the dialogue, with censored profanities? Has AUTHOR ever read a newspaper article?

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1475
God.

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1478
Wrong verb tense.

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1482
Gee, you think?

Note – Six > Page 29 · Location 1483
No one talks like this.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1487
No one talks like this.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1492
Gwen’s a hobbit, apparently.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1493
Terrible writing.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1498
I like that no one answers this question.

Note – Six > Page 30 · Location 1502
This is the second time Arthur, a college student, has ogled a teenager.

Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1507
When does he get close enough to her to read the clue over her shoulder? And who the fuck talks like this? For either of them?

Note – Six > Page 31 · Location 1510
AUTHOR is obsessed with windows.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1523
She is not nine years old. This is a grown person acting like this.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1528
No one talks like this.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1529
This is what you say BEFORE you open the cabinet and start rummaging through shit.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1535
NO ONE TALKS LIKE THIS.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538
Donna is a complete asshole.

Note – Six > Page 32 · Location 1538
And this is where I stopped reading.

Family time!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, ParentingLeave a comment

So what does family time look like when everyone in the house is an introvert?

The boy and I working on Lego sets while my wife works on a puzzle, all of us in the same room, but with minimal conversation happening, because we’re all concentrating.

I’ve been working on the Notre Dame set a few bags at a time for the last several days, but I picked up this AT-AT today and decided to take a break and get this done in one sitting. The Notre Dame set is beautiful, but it’s also crazily repetitive and I didn’t have the strength tonight to make 32 more windows or 10 more flying buttresses. I noticed the instruction manual had a link to the new Lego Builder app, and holy hell, I’m never touching one of the manuals again other than to look through them for the little flavor details they like to sprinkle through them. The app surrounds any new pieces for any particular step with a little glowing aura, making it way harder to miss them than in the manuals, and you can rotate and enlarge the model on the screen.

That’s a Goddamn game-changer right there. Lego manuals are impressively well put together 95% of the time, but sometimes there’s just no way to display a step with one single perfect angle, and letting me zoom and rotate at will was just amazing. Plus they gave me stats at the end, and y’all know how much I like stats. Turns out if you were to stack all of the pieces in that AT-AT on top of one another (I assume the long way, and not actually attaching them to each other?) it would be 6 meters high! I also managed to put together 7 pieces per minute in the hour and fifteen minutes it took me to put the set together. I don’t know what the hell I could possibly do with that information, but I love that I have it.

2025 in Blogwanking, or: WTF, China?

On By Luther M. SilerIn Blogwanking, Geek4 Comments

Let’s start with the good news: traffic was up by two-thirds this year, and depending on how the next two days go this was either the second-best or the third-best year in the history of the site:

We’re still not reaching the heights of 2015, and “In which I tell you how your religion works,” the reason for that huge spike, still sits atop all of my other posts at 113,306 views. Most of the rest are from the Creepy Children’s Programming series and, of course, The Fucking Snowpiercer Post.

Here’s the problem: a large proportion of those views are probably Chinese bots. Why does China care so much about my stupid little website? I have no clue. Why did it start this year? Also no clue. But given that none of my site is in Chinese and I’ve never really discussed anything of particular interest to Chinese citizens, I have a hard time making this geographical distribution make sense:

Worth pointing out: even if you subtract all those Chinese hits out, I’m still up from last year, the fourth year in a row of increased site traffic. It’s just not nearly as impressive. 🙂

Here’s the lifetime geographical distribution, which is about as full as it’s ever going to get, I think:

That white island at the top of the map is Svalbard, which belongs to Norway, and beyond that, we’re looking at North Korea and, frankly, a handful of places that either barely or flat-out don’t have governments: Western Sahara, the Central African Republic, Guinea and Eritrea. Any other missing spots are literally too small for me to be able to pick out of the map.

Here’s how much Chinese traffic I had this year: WordPress just started showing us city data in 2025, and eight of the top twenty cities are in China, including Beijing at #1– I got 2 1/2 times more traffic from Beijing than I did from the city I live in. London, Sydney and Toronto are the first three cities outside of China or the US to show up on the list. We’ll see how much this jumps around next year.

This post will mark 653 days in a row of blogging.

Interaction continues to drop, sadly– well, likes are up slightly, but comments are down, and I feel like comments are more important– and my word count was a little bit down from last year. At just over 1.7 million words over the lifetime of the blog, I’m closing in on that two millionth word:

Obviously I’m not going anywhere; I don’t have anything in the way of specific plans for the future around here other than to keep writing, although I’m considering making the jump from WordPress’ Premium hosting, which I’ve been using for more or less the entire time the blog has been active, to their Business tier. I make enough money now that dropping $300 a year on the site doesn’t feel completely stupid, if only for increased access to stats (I love numbers, as you can see) and better control over how the site looks. We’ll see. January’s a three-paycheck month so I might as well blow some of it, right?

Anyway, if you’re seeing the traffic from China too, let me know– I know of one other WordPress person who has mentioned high Chinese traffic on a mostly-defunct blog, but only the one at the moment. It would make so much less sense if it was just me, y’know?

2025 in Music

On By Luther M. SilerIn movies2 Comments

I bought 59 albums in 2025, way off of last year’s pace, which was admittedly kind of insane. Here’s the list, and then I’ll talk specifically about a few of them. This isn’t a “best of” list by any means, just some albums I find interesting.

And yes, “bought” is the right word, as I generally don’t stream music. I played around with Spotify for a bit this year and then cancelled it when they started showing ads for ICE, and I currently have a Tidal account that I’m not really using.

Let’s start with the band of the year, an award that isn’t even meaningful enough to be rendered in capital letters and which I spent no time thinking about prior to writing this sentence:

In the absence of a new Pearl Jam album this year (and I got one last year, so I can’t complain) a new Counting Crows album is about the best thing I could have asked for– and I not only got that, I got a tour, which I had tickets to. I saw two concerts this year, both in the same venue in Indianapolis; Weird Al was the other one. The Crows have still absolutely got it. There are other bands from my era that are still making music and touring, but … not all of them should be, if you know what I mean, and I think you do.

I’m only picking Problematic because the cover has his face on it, but Norman Sann was absolutely my big discovery in hiphop this year. Dude is phenomenally talented and he’s also a huge geek without really letting it take over his music– like, he’ll drop a reference to Baraka from Mortal Kombat into the middle of a verse, but Nerd Rap is a genre all to itself and this, I think, is not that. I picked up five full-length albums by this guy this year and I very much am impatiently anticipating more.

(Goes and looks, discovers a sixth album came out in September!)

So make that an even 60 for the year, then.

The Sinners soundtrack sparked a sudden and fairly intense interest in streaming Irish rage music, which has cooled a bit, but I’d never really listened to the Dropkick Murphys before this year and I should have started before now. For the People, their latest release, and The Warrior’s Code from 2005 got the most plays. I’ll pick up the rest of their catalog sooner or later but haven’t done it just yet.

I think this is the second time Olivia Rodrigo has shown up on one of these things. I still have issues with how the adults around her handled her first album, but she’s an adult now and she dropped a live album on us late in the year. Live pop isn’t completely my thing– I will never get completely used to the idea of singing over your own voice as a backup track– but there’s a ton of energy in this recording and Robert Smith randomly showing up for a couple of duets in front of a very young crowd who appears to have no idea who the hell he is is a nice touch.

Finally, I just picked up the deluxe edition of Mad Season’s Above last week, and it’s long enough that I haven’t even listened to the whole thing yet, but it’s a Goddamned crime that I had never heard of this album until recently. Do you know who Mad Season is? They released one album– this one– in 1995. They’re a supergroup: Layne Staley from Alice In Chains, Mike McCready from Pearl Jam, Barrett Martin from Screaming Trees on drums, and John Baker Saunders from The Walkabouts. The album is fifteen meaty tracks (the shortest is 4:11, and two are over seven minutes) and one of the very few concerts they did. I’m just now starting to listen to the concert. It’s a remarkable fucking project and I’m pissed that I didn’t completely internalize it in 1995 when I should have.

What did you listen to this year?

Burn the whole technology to the ground

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Teaching2 Comments

It’s been a few days since I’ve given you any kind of proper post, so let’s see what I can scrape out of my brain tonight.

This’ll do: I wanted something a little different from usual for today’s lesson, as we’ve been working on solving equations for weeks and I’m tired of Google forms and worksheets and their textbook is still pitching too high for them to hit. I found an assignment I liked in my partner teacher’s class and imported it over to mine; basically a Who Wants to be a Millionaire? type game centered around the right kind of math. I played through about half of it to make sure it fit what I needed it to do and called it good.

I tell my first hour they’re my guinea pigs a lot of the time; they’re my brightest of my non-Algebra groups and they’ll both notice and let me know (neither of these things are guaranteed) if something is wrong with an assignment. And kids quickly start coming to me with bewildered looks on their faces. “Isn’t the answer to this a decimal?” and other similar questions.

Shit. Naturally none of the mistakes in the assignment were in the part I looked at. They’re all in the back half. And it turns out that three of the questions out of, like, fifteen have wrong answers. And this game is multiple choice and it makes you start over if you’re wrong. I find myself writing things like THE ANSWER TO THE $32,000 QUESTION IS D, JUST TRUST ME on the board.

Give yourself a pat on the back if you have already figured out that I eventually determined that all of the questions on the assignment were created by AI, which apparently can’t even do eighth grade math right. It took a few minutes but I was able to figure out how the assignment was created and pulled together a new one, and four of the questions on that were initially wrong, but this time I knew to look for it and could edit them. I managed to get everything fixed before my next class started, but I won’t be using this service again.

There was a disclaimer that “questions should be reviewed for accuracy” at the bottom of the screen, of course.

Absolutely Goddamned ridiculous that these people would rather rely on AI that they know is fucking up than create a bloody question bank. Idiots.

Some Sunday odds and ends

On By Luther M. SilerIn Reviews2 Comments

Had an enormous traffic spike the last couple of days– yesterday was the highest traffic day in years, possibly since the Syrian refugees post hit a couple hundred thousand views ten years ago. And other than the fact that most of them were from America (with a much smaller but still weird four-day pop from Chile, of all places) I don’t know anything about any of the visitors.

It was probably a bot– I’ve also been getting a lot of traffic from China lately– but I thought bot visits didn’t count? I wish I could get more detail on my views.

Today? Dead quiet.

We are finally, after fourteen years of living in this house, replacing the hideous curtains in our bedroom and the gross miniblinds in our living room. I found this behind the hardware for the curtains and I would like a word with whoever built this place. I just wanna talk.

I’m not doing a full review of it, but this is a really good book. My only problem is that Hastings has a weird habit of drawing attention to the race of any American who isn’t white when it isn’t necessary– there was an actual chapter about race relations among American troops, and I’ll cut some slack on that one, but just for example, referring to the youngest soldier to die in Vietnam as “a black kid” in a weirdly flippant way really stuck out. My only problem is that now I want to read twelve other books on Vietnam that he mentioned (sidenote: are there any histories of the war written in English by Vietnamese scholars?) and my backlog is bad enough already.

This image from my email is not exactly inaccurate, but I feel like maybe Amazon is still having some tech problems.

After over a year of threatening to watch it, my wife and I finally sat down to watch John Wick 4 last night, and I will forever refer to it as The Dumb John Wick. I’ve seen all of them now, and I never really loved the series, but this one takes everything that was sorta ridiculous about the first three movies and turns those up to 12, while also not adding anything of real value to the series, ignoring the cliffhanger ending of 3, and being way, way, way too long. Is there a lore reason why there are literally no cops at all in the John Wick universe, for example? Blech.

You might not be able to tell, but this picture was taken outside the window as I was removing the curtains earlier today. At 6:30. I fucking hate daylight savings time. Hate. Can we please be a society just for a little while and get rid of this bullshit? Please?

And finally, as of tonight I’ve read just over 2600 pages on my new Kindle, which means that I’ve managed to adopt the thing into my lifestyle successfully … and the battery is still at 16%, which is bloody impressive.

On rare books, Mark Twain, and penises

On By Luther M. SilerIn art, Reading, ReviewsLeave a comment

I am not quite halfway through with Ron Chernow’s 1200-page biography of Mark Twain, so it would be unfair to call this a “review” per se, but … c’mon. It’s a book by one of America’s preeminent historians about very likely the most important writer ever born on American soil. I’ve already read and loved his biographies of Hamilton and Washington, and I’ll get to the Grant and Rockefeller books sooner or later. There’s no universe where this isn’t a magnificent book, and it’s not like there’s going to be any plot twists in the last five hundred pages. This is a great biography already and it’s enormously unlikely I’m going to encounter anything that will change my mind– and if I do, it’ll change my mind about Mark Twain, and not about Chernow’s book about him.

All that said, I learned something today, and I fell down a rabbit hole looking for more information about it, and I need to share this information with you.

If you buy one of the approximately one billion available editions of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that include the original engravings, you will encounter at some point this image of Huck, his Uncle Silas, and his Aunt Sally:

You will note the arrow pointing just underneath Uncle Silas’ crotch, and you will note the straight line of his pants. You may also note the look on Aunt Sally’s face, which I feel deserves more attention in general.

This is not the image that was in the first printing of the book. That image looked like this, known as the “curved fly” engraving:

See that curved line? That’s the original engraving by E.W. Kemble, whose name you’ll note in the lower right. Twain selected Kemble himself, and presumably did not vet this image of Uncle Silas for a single slightly, barely bulgey line in his pants.

After a few hundred copies of the first edition were printed, a salesman noticed that someone had somehow changed the engraving to … well, this:

That right there, folks, is Uncle Silas’ cock, although it appears to be growing out of his leg rather than in the usual location. Maybe that has something to do with the look on Aunt Sally’s face, I dunno. Maybe dicks were different in 1884. You’ll note that said penis is pointed directly at Huck, which isn’t relevant to the story but adds an extra little twist of creepy to it.

Anyway, the edition was very speedily recalled, and the offending pages destroyed, although an unknown number of copies remained in the wild. A book with the offending penis in it has never made it to auction or been sold publicly, and it’s not known how many might be out there. (Check out this absolutely amazing contemporary article about the controversy from New York World. The euphemisms. My God, the nineteenth-century euphemisms.)

The University of Virginia has at least one copy of the edition with the penis, which is where the image came from. They had to redo the engraving for the rest of the no-longer-“first” edition, and the new version of the engraving had a straight fly.

Copies of the “curved fly” edition (without the penis) go for lots and lots of money. My favorite detail about that $15,000 listing? Shipping is $4.00 and they accept returns within thirty days.

The person who altered the engraving was never identified.

Ow

On By Luther M. SilerIn lifeLeave a comment

In retrospect, I should have kept the tooth, or at least gotten a picture of it. I did ask to see it, and I was surprised at how small it was for some reason. One would think I would know how big my own teeth are! I do not.

That said, despite finding out that I was also scheduled for a filling on a tooth that I had thought the doc said we were just going to keep an eye on, the procedure was quick and more or less completely painless. I want to say something like “the shots were the worst part,” but the shots weren’t even enough to qualify as bad, since they start with numbing gel anyway, so I barely felt them. The drilling for the filling (heh) seemed like it took less than a minute. There’s been no pain post-removal, at least not yet. I’m supposed to be super religious about soft foods for at least another couple of days, so hopefully nothing dumb is going to happen between now and then.

One weird thing: we very nearly had to cancel the extraction because of my blood pressure. I also had a doctor’s appointment this morning, and my blood pressure was a reasonable 120/83. The first two readings in the dentist’s chair, despite me not feeling either especially nervous or, really, any emotional or physical symptoms at all, were an absolutely insane 173/120 and 171/123, both of which are alarmingly close to get to the hospital right now levels of hypertension. They did the filling and tested me again and it was down to 136/87, still high, but not what the fuck high. It’s crazy to me that my blood pressure can get that high without me feeling any particular sort of way while it’s going on, but had it hit that a third time they’d have had to reschedule me with an oral surgeon who could put me completely under instead of doing the extraction in-office.

Weird.

I’ve spent the majority of the day since getting home blasting through Dungeon Crawler Carl VI: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride on my Kindle; I’ve probably read over half of it today and I’m getting progressively more and more angry about how fucking good this series is. It’s absolutely unfair that something this ridiculous has this much emotional heft to it. Somebody should be in jail. It doesn’t have to be anyone affiliated with the book, as I doubt Matt Dinniman could finish the series from behind bars, so we may have to pick someone else. The President, maybe.