It’s here

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This seems as good a time as any to point out that Diablo IV released yesterday, and if you’re the type of person to care about such a thing– and even if you’re not– that evening livestreams are gonna be a thing over at the channel for the next little while. I’m not going to commit to every evening or anything like that because presumably my family wants to see me, but I don’t feel like this game works for my normal half-hour-to-forty-minute video format, so livestreams it is. Here’s a link directly to tonight’s stream; I think a small number of my students showed up toward the end, so chat got kinda lively for the last 15 minutes or so, which was nice. Go check it out, and hopefully I’ll see y’all in there once in a while.

I have updates about Dr. Curry; the short version is that I’ve Done Stuff, but said Stuff hasn’t resulted in any actual, like, action yet. I’ll fill y’all in tomorrow.

Improvement!

Luther M. Siler

Today was better, and I’m blaming yesterday on Monday. Tomorrow is an inservice day so I have none of the childrens, then Thursday and Friday and then another weekend. Teaching: where the first quarter of the year features no five-day weeks. The great thing about tomorrow is whatever meetings or training or thing they have planned for us, it’s not going to be a waste of my time and at no point will I be blatantly and openly disrespected. It’s gonna be awesome!

My Big Important Task tonight is to get Isshin Ashina beaten so that my schedule on LutherPlaysGames doesn’t get messed with; I need Content tomorrow, so Content I must generate. Are you following me over there yet? You should be, if only because I’m getting tantalizingly close to 250 followers and that’s an important number psychologically. It’s 1/4 of the way to being eligible to get paid! It only took two years of daily videos to get here! I’m sure it’ll get faster soon.

(In case you’ve been around here for several years, Isshin Ashina is this guy, who took literal weeks to beat last time I fought him. I have, oh, a couple of hours, max. It’ll be fine.)

EDIT: Got ‘im. It’s too late to get the episode edited together for tomorrow, so there will just be Wo Long, but I’ll have it ready Thursday.

Station Identification, Nov. 5 2022

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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!

Seriously, come hang out

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The YouTube channel is, at least by my not-quite-lofty standards, blowing up lately, and the current series I’m doing on A Plague Tale: Requiem already has four or five videos over a hundred views. I’m not sure what’s driving it but I’m definitely happy about it, especially since all of my other social media stuff has been pretty stagnant lately. We’re back to two videos a day until I’m back at school again, so this is a good time to jump on, especially if people being eaten by rats in fourteenth-century France is your bag.

(sudden realization)

I’ve been seeing big jumps in page views at night, although today that pattern has been broken somewhat. I just now figured out why– it’s because I’m playing through the game in French, and I bet if I check in a couple of days I’ll have been getting lots of traffic from France. That’s cool for now but it’s not great in terms of people sticking around once this series is over. We’ll see, I guess.

Let’s see, what else is going on? Carpet Man is coming tomorrow to measure my living room. After that Project Empty The Living Room starts, which I’m not looking forward to, and then over the next week we have two different sets of contractors coming over for two different projects, and my brain is melty as hell right now because there’s too much going on.

I read Kara Jorgensen’s excellent The Reanimator’s Heart, which you should read and I should do a full review of. I’m starting Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Eyes of the Void tonight, which … I may talk about that tomorrow too, because it’s not the large print edition and yet somehow has the biggest type I think I’ve ever seen in any non-large-print book. We all know Tchaikovsky can write long, so it’s weird that they felt like they needed to increase his page count like this. I’ll post pictures eventually, trust me, but it’s gotta be 14-point text. I should check the first book in the series and see if it was huge type too. It’s actually distracting.

… yeah, that’s what I’ve got. What’s up in your neck of the woods? Do you even live in the woods? Nobody lives in the woods anymore.

Well that was certainly a day

Luther M. Siler

I’m not going to go into a lot of details, but one of our teachers was assaulted last night at a soccer game, and holy shit did that make for a busy day for Union Guy today. I spent all day Handling Business and then got home and sent approximately four thousand words worth of emails and now I am very much ready for a few days where I do not speak to anyone under 35 whose genetic material I was not personally responsible for.

(I get to pet giraffes on Sunday. It’s going to be a good weekend.)

The thing is, I haven’t had a bad day yet. That’s the truth. I’ve had some long ones, but we’ll hit a solid month of school next week and I haven’t written a single office referral that was actually for me. There was one issue that happened in the girls’ bathroom that I happened to be the staffer on hand for and I made it clear that I hadn’t witnessed it, and a handful of uniform violations that I don’t really give a shit about and nobody is going to pay attention to anyway. It’s September 9th and I’ve barely raised my voice. I don’t know what the hell is going on. It’s been so long since I enjoyed teaching that I don’t even trust the idea anymore.

Complete change of subject here: The current series on the channel is the supremely interesting Raji: An Ancient Epic, but that’s going to be ending on Saturday, and as of right now I’m not 100% sure what the next Let’s Play is going to be. I’m not convinced that there’s a lot of overlap between my YouTube people and my blog people, but I was considering lifting an idea from Penny Arcade and finding a super-cheap game that I didn’t know anything about every couple of weeks or so and playing it for half an hour just to see what I think of it. Some of them might turn into Let’s Plays sooner or later but the idea would be just to find something completely random and see if I could turn it into an entertaining video. If it blew up somehow I might let people suggest games. Does that sound interesting at all?