The blog of Luther M. Siler, teacher, author and local curmudgeon
I tried to come up with something properly alliterative, but “Song Sunday” sounds kinda stupid so to hell with it.
Anyway, I’ve been on a reggae kick lately for the first time in a while, and I’m betting that unless you’re into reggae or you spend a lot of time on TikTok, you’ve probably not heard of Queen Omega, so let’s fix that. This song, Agape Love, is one of my favorites by her. Check it out.
It looks like my predictions about the Titan sub were correct; those men were dead before they had any idea anything was wrong, which given the circumstances is absolutely and undeniably the best way to go. I swear to you that what I am about to talk to you about is an utter coincidence and has nothing to do with the sub. I swear.(*)
I thought this was going to be the summer of Diablo IV, and I’m starting to think, having beaten the main story and unlocked the third (of four) difficulty tiers today, that I’m getting bored with it. Not because it isn’t a good game, or at least it is a perfect exemplar of the kind of game that it wants to be. It’s a really really good loot-based ARPG! It just turns out that I think loot-based ARPGs are kind of boring, or at least that they’re best in not-very-large doses.
No, it’s looking like this may be the summer of Subnautica, which is an older game– originally released all the way back in 2014, although this is an updated version– that I have been avoiding for no real reason. A whole lot of people have told me to play Subnautica over the years, and I basically only started paying the thing because I don’t really have much else to play at the moment that’s new so I may as well check out an older game. It’s technically a survival/resource-gathering/base-building type of game, and those usually leave me cold, but this one is really well done, and also allows you to play the game either with or without having to worry about food and water. I tried a few episodes where I could starve and die of thirst and it was annoying, so I turned them off and started over, and I’ve been having a much better time with it since then.
The premise? Your spacecraft crash-lands on an unknown alien aquatic world. Good luck! Try and stay alive. I’m having a blast.
If you’re wondering if this is going to turn out to be another plug for my YouTube site, the answer is yes, although I wanted to talk about the game anyway, so it all works out fine. Check out the playlist– Episode 3 dropped today, and I just recorded Episode 12, so I’m way ahead– right here.
(*) The series is actually doing quite well so far, relatively speaking, and … oh, God, it’s not because of that, is it?
I have linked to Disturbed’s version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” several times on this site. I love it. I think it’s better than the original.
I found out yesterday that they have also covered Genesis’ Land of Confusion, which … I was unprepared for. So of course I’m going to share it with all of you. Partially because it’s actually good and partially because it’s been rent-free in my head and on constant repeat and I want it out.
And, of course, since the original version was also a hell of a video, the Genesis version:
Otherwise, I’m finding myself in a bit of a mood tonight, so this is all you get tonight. I fully expect to discover Disturbed has covered My Heart Will Go On sometime in the next week or so.
There’s still time to follow me on YouTube if you want to get me a Father’s Day present.
I’m traveling today— I met my niece!— so this is what you get.
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.
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.
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.
So. Yeah. Follow me! On all the things! And if there are other places I should be checking out, let me know!
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.