Tag: writing

Down, down, to Goblin town

On By Luther M. SilerIn TeachingLeave a comment

There’s this weird thing going on with my incoming students where a ton of them have the same last names as people I either went to high school with or was otherwise friends with as a kid. I actually have never independently known a kid’s parents, or if I did I never had to have any contact with them.

Maybe?

That’s true, I think. Definitely never had to talk to any of them. Maybe I had one guy’s nephew, but he definitely never came to PTCs. At any rate, I’ve done a fair amount of cyberstalking this week and so far I haven’t uncovered any connections of any of these kids to anyone I know; that most likely means that there’s no relation, as none of the names are terribly unique, but I suppose I could have some distant cousins or something. I did find out that one of my mom’s oldest friends died at the end of April from breast cancer, and I’m in this weird place where I’m not actually surprised that the family didn’t get ahold of my brother or I, not least because I make it my mission in life to make myself hard to find on the internet (you can find my teaching license if you know my real name, but even that’s under a slightly unexpected combination of my name and initials), but also just because at this point I’m like a third-removed acquaintance of any of her kids and it’s just not reasonable to expect a call. I called her when Mom died, but I don’t think that necessarily transfers to them having to call me, y’know?

Anyway, point is, I’d have gone to the service. Which may actually not have happened yet, as the obituary says “at a later date.” Yeah, let me talk to you about putting “at a later date” in an obituary; it showed up in my mom’s and then Covid hit, and as of right now my mother has never had a funeral.

That, uh, isn’t quite where I meant this post to go, but sometimes the words do what they want.

Anyway, I’ve begun the annual Spending Money For My Classroom Unwisely spree, and there’s a surprisingly small box in my garage with a a vacuum-packed and possibly dehydrated Boneless Loveseat in it, and– amazingly, at my wife’s suggestion– I solved my desk chair conundrum by ordering a new desk chair for my office, with the plan to move the old one to my classroom once the new hotness shows up. I’m going to try to avoid ordering any new lighting this year, and I shouldn’t need any posters or anything, so hopefully these two big-ish purchases will be all I need this year.

(Teachers: don’t spend money on your classrooms. Don’t be like me. I make bad decisions.)

(The old chair is this chair, which I ordered a year before that post and I’ve now had for four and a half years, and if I took the time to clean the cat hair off of it, it would look brand fucking new despite me having spent at least an hour or two a day in it every day since I got it. So the new one is also a Secret Lab chair. They’re expensive, but fuck it; I’m clearly getting my money’s worth.)

(They also made my desk, which is this desk. I don’t seem to have ever reviewed it, but I love the desk too. These people own my soul.)

I finally beat Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 last night, and I’m trying to decide if I’m going to review it or not. I think I probably will do a full review, as the game’s failures are all of a very specific kind and I think it’s interesting. So maybe tomorrow.

In which I KNEW IT

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reading6 Comments

Seven years ago, in 2018, this man’s debut novel jumped off a shelf at me at Barnes and Noble. It looked satisfyingly chunky and as a science fiction book that was obviously going to be Part One of a substantial series, it was something that was immediately Aligned with My Interests.

I opened it and flipped through it and looked at this author picture. And thought Jeez, that guy looks like a prick. I bet he’s a conservative.

And then I put the book down.

And, standing there in Barnes and Noble, I googled this man to see if I could find evidence of him being a prick. And, indeed, I couldn’t find any, and the closest I came was him claiming he “doesn’t talk about politics” on Twitter, which is something that only conservatives say.

And after a few minutes I started feeling bad about it! This is not how I usually work. My rule for politics in my reading has always been Don’t Want None Won’t Be None, and how it is supposed to work is you can believe whatever you want so long as you don’t go out of your way to make that information available to me, but as soon as you do I will judge you accordingly. And, to be completely clear, I’m perfectly fine with people applying that same line of reasoning to me. You can choose to not read a book– which, most of the time, costs you money— for literally any reason you want. Refuse to read a book with a blue cover. Spend a year reading only books with blue covers. I don’t care. There are way more books out there than anyone has time to read in an entire lifetime, with more coming out literally every day, so you use whatever filter you want. I don’t have anything to say about it.

Feeling guilty and kind of stupid, I bought his book. And brought it home, and read it, and really didn’t like it all that much. And it sat on the shelf for five or six years while four sequels came out, and sometime in the last couple of years I looked at it again and thought oh, what the hell, and for whatever reason the second time around I liked it a lot more, and the sequels quickly followed, along with the sixth book, on release day. The series wasn’t world-changing or anything, but it was solid and interesting, and it was also clear that barring some sort of car accident or something it was going to be finished soon.

So how do I feel about the fact that a 2018 interview has come to light recently where not only does he piss and moan about how every YA book nowadays is about a girl who “wants to be an assassin for some reason” and there aren’t any books for boys, and about his affection for Jordan Peterson?

I am, to be clear, almost certainly going to buy the last book of his series when it comes out, which should be this year or early next year. This isn’t JK Rowling or Neil Gaiman territory, where the books are forever consigned to the pit. He’s just a conservative Catholic, and frankly the fact that the interview lurked in the depths for years before exploding onto TikTok in the last couple of weeks for whatever reason means that he actually does seem to be following my DWNWBN rule. But I likely won’t bother with whatever he does next, and next time I’m gonna trust my gut when I take a look at an author and get a vibe. Because, again, there’s lots of books out there, and I don’t need a good reason not to buy one.

This is kind of awkwardly stapling two posts together (and there will be an addendum at the end featuring even more stapling) but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how weirdly gendered reading seems to be getting. I have never believed that there was any such thing as “girls’ books” or “boys’ books”– I’ve told the story here a few times before about my aunt catching me with Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret when I was ten or so, a book I picked up and read because it was there and I was bored, and her being vocally horrified, and me being completely baffled about what the problem was. But just because I don’t believe there’s any such thing as gendered books doesn’t mean that society doesn’t think so, and it feels like in the last couple of years reading has taken this weird slide into being Something Men Don’t Do, which is entirely fucking unacceptable. This is particularly clear in retail establishments that sell books but aren’t bookstores– go look at the books in Target sometime, for example, and I’ve seen pictures of Wal-Mart’s book selection and it seems to be the same thing. Target clearly doesn’t think men read.

(Do more women read than men? Sure. But that’s not the same thing as “men don’t read.”)

I think this is probably mostly BookTok’s fault, which is dominated by women, and whatever, I’m not attached enough to my own gender to be bothered if something is addressed to “my book girlies” and happens to overlap with my interests.

But did I kinda want to fight when I saw this? A little:

@rhireadsitall

is there a way??? #booktok #bookstagram #booktube

♬ nanana x cola – ❤️‍🔥

Anyway, one way or another, I’m not going anywhere. If that makes me a book girlie, I’ve been called worse.

You may remember a couple of weeks ago when my family attempted to go to a specific local Italian restaurant and, in a comedy of errors, managed to end up at the wrong restaurant, eating a meal there because we are cowards, and resulting in me not getting carrot cake, which was the entire reason I wanted to eat at that place in the first place.

Well. My birthday was yesterday, but my birthday dinner was tonight:

I could only finish half of that gorgeous sonofabitch. I don’t even want to know what my blood sugar is right now. I’m getting my A1C checked later this week in advance of a regular doctor visit next week, and I may just show the doctor a picture of this cake when she jumps down my throat about how I’m so diabetic I’m legally already dead.

The Weird Al show

On By Luther M. SilerIn MusicLeave a comment

My God, that was an incredible show.

Al Yankovic is 65 years old. It was literally 90 degrees in the shade in Indianapolis yesterday evening. I have no idea how anyone on stage even survived the experience in the first place, and they put on a two-hour-plus show featuring at least a dozen costume changes (everyone in the band, not just Al himself) and startlingly impressive dancing. If my foot ever ends up above my head, it is not going to be on purpose, and it is likely that I have either just died or am about to. Al did a high-kick like five or six times during the show. And when I talk about costume changes, I don’t mean, like, wearing a different shirt. I mean getting into a full-blown fat suit complete with facial prosthetics in three minutes and then doing an entire song in that getup, or doing the last fifteen minutes of the show in Jedi robes.

The man’s voice is still on point, too. The set list was ridiculous; some of the songs were done medley-style where he’d do a verse or two and then move on, but he’s been doing albums since the early eighties and while there probably wasn’t literally a track or two from every single album, the show absolutely spanned his entire career. I discovered that there are Weird Al songs that I probably haven’t heard in thirty years that I still have memorized. I was singing along with songs and mentally trying to jump ahead to the chorus to figure out what the hell I was singing.

The polka was new, and there were at least a couple of songs that were unreleased. He covered the costume changes with video vignettes featuring every single time anyone on a TV show has ever mentioned him, random little clips of weirdness, and a bunch of junket-style interviews with celebrities where I’m pretty sure some were him being inserted into other interviews, some were him interviewing people who had no idea who he was, and some were piss-takes where everybody was in on the joke.

(I’m going through my MP3s right now. Nothing was played from Poodle Hat. No, that’s wrong, he did Ebay. Still looking.)

(Okay, I’m pretty sure the only album he didn’t do a song from was 1993’s Alapalooza. That’s it.)

Anyway, yeah. Best birthday ever, y’all.

All right, let’s do this, damn it

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocy, Reading3 Comments

Well, that was a fun little rabbit hole to fall into at 10:00 in the morning.

I posted these beauties not long after buying them, and they make me happy each and every time I walk past them, which was how I justified the $Jesusdon’task cost. The problem: despite their status as one of the non-negotiable canon series of fantasy literature, I haven’t finished the damn series. I’ve read the first … five? Six? and tried to reread/finish them a few years ago and had to tap out after the second book.

I’m doing this, damn it. I’ve spent a lot of money on this damn series and I’m stuffing it into my brain whether I want it there or not. I’m not stupid enough to try and read them straight through, though; I’ll commit to one a month (still over a year!) and try to go at least a little faster than that in practice.

(I plan to start with New Spring, the prologue, which I haven’t actually read yet. If you have strong feelings about whether I should hold off until later, let me know, but do keep in mind that I’ve read the first two books twice each already. You have, like, an hour or two until I’ve started it and can’t be stopped.)

I recognize that “I started a book!” maybe isn’t the most compelling blog content ever, but I wanted to mark the first date in something less ephemeral than Bluesky. So.

Anyway, that rabbit hole: I thought that I had posted about these books when I got them, and I couldn’t find the post at first. It took me a minute to track the post down, because the words “Wheel of Time” didn’t actually show up in the post title. I went to Google and searched “infinitefreetime wheel of time” and this bullshit happened:

Other than the first half-sentence of the second paragraph, none of that is fucking true. Those quotes? Not real. The AI made the whole thing the fuck up. I hate this fucking useless-ass, destructive-ass technology with every fiber of my being and I cannot wait for it to die, hopefully taking a large chunk of the stupider element of our tech sector along with it.

So, yeah. I’m starting up on Wheel of Time again, and fuck GenAI straight to Hell.

Public Service Announcement

On By Luther M. SilerIn idiocyLeave a comment

Just in case you haven’t heard, even by 2025’s standards there was a pretty massive fuck-up by somebody this week, with billions-with-a-b of passwords leaked.(*) And it’s looking like a lot of them were from Apple and Google and Facebook, and places like that where you really want to make sure your password is secure. I changed about twenty passwords today– all of my email addresses except for work, anything connected with money, and this site– and while it was a pretty big pain in the ass, it really needed to be done.

You’re using a password manager, by the way, right? You should be using a password manager. Make your password for that a four-or five-word phrase that you’ll remember, substituting a couple of numbers for letters or maybe doing some strategic misspelling, and let the app worry about everything else.

Anyway, point is, go do that.

Dammit, I had something else for this. Uh … shit, getting old sucks; I’m watching a video on another monitor while I’m writing this and I’ve lost the ability to pay attention to more than one thing at once. Expect a quick post tomorrow; we’re going to my brother’s to celebrate both of his kids’ birthdays; we’ve had to reschedule this a couple of times now because one or both of them keep getting sick, so hopefully nothing other than the heat will be getting in our way tomorrow.

Gaaaah. If I remember the other thing I’ll either throw up another post or just edit this. There was definitely something but it’s gone right now. Sigh.

(*) I’m not actually certain of any of the details of the leak, which looks like it had to have been multiple simultaneous leaks, somehow? I just know I pay attention whenever Apple or Google gets hit by one of these things because those are the accounts I really don’t need compromised.

EDIT: Oh! I remembered! I woke up this morning to discover that I had a couple hundred page views already, which is not normal– usually there will be no more than a couple dozen overnight. The other weird thing? They were all from Hong Kong, and the specific posts that were seeing a bunch of views were all older posts with no clear relationship to one another. We’ll see if it happens tonight. Those couple hundred page views were also spread out over a hundred or so individual visitors, so it’s not like one person went through a big chunk of the site or something. So … yeah, Hong Kong folks, if you come back, can you tell me why? 🙂

Summer Projects mode, maybe

On By Luther M. SilerIn life5 Comments

I am nothing if not encouraging.

I have spent all day thinking of Decluttering, which is kind of a ludicrous term for me to use under any circumstances, but especially under these: I need to get rid of a lot of my shit so that I have room for more shit. I do not at all intend to lead a life of acquiring less shit, which would be the more sensible approach to … well, everything. Most of my ideas for this summer involve either getting rid of shit or clearing any of half a dozen different backlogs of unread books, unplayed video games, TV shows and movies I want to watch, and unbuilt Lego sets. The biggest need around the house, other than cleaning and organizing, is to fix the fence in the back yard that the tree fell on, which my wife is convinced we can do on our own. She has to catch me in the right mood to do it, but that’s at least imaginable.

Part of me really wants to review the book I posted about yesterday, but I don’t think I’m going to. Those of you who figured out what it was (and I apologize for being coy, but sometimes I don’t want a pan to show up on a Google search) may possibly have remembered that I reviewed the first book in the series and did not mention constant terrible writing. I kind of want to pick it back up and reread a couple of chapters to see if it has the same writing problems and I just was able to ignore them for some reason. I am interested to see if it had a different editor than the first book. If so, there are two more books and some novellas, and I really hope he had the original editor for all of those. We’ll see.

Anybody have big plans for Memorial Day? We do not, which is what I want; I need to create some substitute assignments (as in, they substitute for assignments I can’t print, not “I’m planning on needing a substitute”) for Tuesday and Wednesday and finish grading about an inch of final exams, but that and eating a couple of brats pretty much sum up my plans for the day. Let me know if you’ve got anything cool going on.

I need a new word

On By Luther M. SilerIn Writing7 Comments

There is a very specific type of bad writing that I feel like we need a name for, and this couple of paragraphs from the book I’m currently reading may be the literal Platonic ideal of it:

I’m not going to name the book, but the sleuths and generically curious among you shouldn’t have a whole lot of trouble figuring it out.

  1. This is the wrong verb, in a way that would make Mark Twain’s eyelid twitch. One does not “snatch” a piece of paper that is sitting on one’s own desk.
  2. Also the wrong verb. I also kind of want to quibble about the use of the word “worn,” which implies age– “tattered” might work better here. That said, I think this is probably the point I’m most willing to argue about.
  3. A blockade “of sorts”? You’re surrounded by twenty thousand enemy troops. That’s a fucking blockade. Or, even better, a siege, which has the advantage of being the correct word.
  4. Two sentences ago you said the blockade happened “one night past,” and now they’re testing your defenses “each night.” You’ve got to be outnumbered thirty to one; what the hell could they be waiting for?
  5. How are the scouts getting past the twenty thousand enemy troops? Why do you need scouts when you’re fucking surrounded? Also, how the hell did this letter get past the siege in the first place?
  6. This is Capital One arena, which seats twenty thousand, in far tighter accommodations than troops besieging a fort would use. See note #5.
  7. This is a world where dragons exist. So do the Uraks themselves, who are basically tall orcs. “Monsters” really doesn’t tell me anything about what these “larger beasts” are.
  8. Why? Why in the world would you not believe them?
  9. I don’t think you will, sir, and you’re sending this letter because you don’t think you will either, so “No matter” is a really weird way to conclude this letter.

This book is six hundred and eighty pages long, and this type of thing is on nearly every page, although it’s quite a bit more concentrated than usual here. I’m going to finish the book today, because while the writing is … again, I need a word more descriptive than “terribad” here, the story itself is engaging enough to keep me interested. But god, man, find a better editor. You need the help.

On my inner magpie, and other thoughts

On By Luther M. SilerIn Geek, Teaching1 Comment

So, um, these showed up today. They are hand-numbered, 41/199. When I die, my wife can sell them to pay for my funeral. They will make me happy every time I walk past my bookshelves for the rest of my life.

Have I read the books yet? Nope. Although now I kind of have to. We’ll make it a summer project.

Teachers complain a lot, right? The understatement of the decade, surely. Like, read the site for five minutes. Teachers complain a lot. But one thing I feel like doesn’t get discussed enough is how emotionally fucked up the end of the school year can be, and now that I’m down to the last three days I’m starting to really have to stare that in the face. This has, on the balance, not been a bad year– there have certainly been moments, there always are, but in the main it’s been a pretty good year. Top half, let’s say.

Some years aren’t all that bad– last year comes to mind. But this year there are a good half dozen kids who I really, really like, who I’ve grown pretty close to over the course of the year … and I get to see them three more times and that’s it. They’re gone. And because I teach 8th grade, it’s worse, because they’re not just no longer in my class, they’re gone entirely. Like, maybe I’ll see them when they do their grad walk in four years, but that barely counts? And even if they do stay in touch, and some of them do, of course, it’s not like this is the kind of relationship where I can drag somebody out to lunch or go see a movie or some shit like that. Like, not even in a “that’s kinda weird” sorta way! A “people are going to assume terrible crimes are happening!” sort of way!

I don’t want to commit crimes! I just think your kid is cool and I would like to keep them in my life after seeing them nearly every fucking day for a year.

Next Thursday is going to really suck, is what I’m saying.

Related, but not really: I had a parent email me about a concern over the final, which in and of itself is just fine, but in the middle of the message she threw in “as you know, he tried taking his life a little over a month ago,” and NO THE MERRY FUCK I DID NOT, MA’AM. I thought for a minute she had mentioned it and I had forgotten, somehow, and looked through every previous email I’ve gotten from her, and … NOPE. There very much was no message about it.

And, like, how do you respond to that? Do I just pretend she told me? I ended up not directly addressing it one way or another and answering the substance of the email, which feels … weirdly flippant, somehow? I feel like I’m yadda-yaddaing a suicide attempt, but I also really don’t want to correct her on it. I may contact our social worker and see if he knew about it, but that potentially opens up an entire different can of worms if he didn’t.

Mental note, don’t put the question in writing.