Demon Lord of a Small Village

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So, there’s been a project that I’ve been kicking around for a few years. It originally began as a story idea that grew from another idea for a light novel, and took on a small life of its own among my pastime of typing words into a computer. When I was reaching the end of the experiment, I found myself wanting to continue that tale, and well, by the time I was working on the second major story arc, I was already thinking of publishing the first one as a traditional ebook in order to share it with a wider group or creating a new section on my website to host the series.

In the end, I decided to focus on a Kindle release.

Now available on Amazon!

As Lucious lay dying on the battlefield, he never could have imagined that his final moments would lead him to a meeting with the breathtaking goddess Luna. She needed a champion’s aid in saving her realm of Cerulea, but it turns out there is just one problem with saving the world – she needed him to become the demon lord!

Reincarnated into a world full of swords and sorcery, Lucious is left in the tutelage of the goddess’s devotees, from whom he learns all manner of magic and martial arts. He spent his childhood in the demon’s village of Nefharoh, preparing for a future confrontation with humanity’s summoned hero.

Meanwhile, the half-elven Seraphim grew up traveling across Cerulea with her merchant parents. At first, she believed that Lucious found her annoying, but as they spent more time together by the river, they became close allies, supporting each other, and their friendship blossomed with the passing years.

However, life remained peaceful in the quiet village of Nefharoh as time passed. Seraphim inherited her father’s business, becoming a successful merchant herself, while Lucious resigned himself to living an ordinary life, believing that he would never be called upon to face down the hero. When Seraphim needed protection for a special delivery to the capital, Lucious joined her on the road, unaware that this journey would push them both closer to their destinies and to each other.

Recently, I turned my attention from ideas on volume 8’s story to preparing the first volume for publishing, specifically having a professional book cover made. While the general flow of the story hasn’t changed since my original creation, significant editing and cleanup has gone into publishing volume 1, along with writing a new chapter bridging the first and second acts.

The more I’ve worked on my little hobby, the more I’ve enjoyed their adventures and the characters that join them along the way. Volume 1 focuses on the protagonists and introducing them and their world, setting the stage for the rest of the story arc and those that follow it.

I’ve written a fair bit of stuff for fun over the years, but I usually talk myself out of taking it any further than a short story. Well, this time I managed to talk myself in the other direction. Over time it’s gone from a small concept to a complete work with a length similar to the light novels I often read for fun. Here’s hoping that some readers out there will enjoy Lucious and Seraphim’s antics, and be interested in later volumes.

Perhaps I’ll add a section to my website as a place for books I’ve written…assuming I can talk myself into sharing the rest of my stories, lol.

As a side note, ordinarily I don’t earn anything if you click links on my site. Never had any interest in that sort of thing since this place serves as my journal. But obviously as the author of the book, this scenario is a tad different :).

Necromancers: Like a Cleric but Cheaper

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Having watched this series a while, I can’t help but think it an appropriate episode for the halloween season.

And it totally figures that Evandra and the Necromancer are on such friendly terms. The only shocking part is the apology, lol.

From Pro to Mini

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Based on progress thus far, it’s looking like the iPad Pro will be retiring after five years of use, most of them as my primary computing device for non-gaming tasks, and the past year as a secondary since I mainly find myself desk bound.

Adjusted for the years, the A17 Pro is exactly what I wanted versus the 6th generation Mini, and a much appreciated bump from the A12X. Not to mention the increased storage capacity out of the box.

This will be the first time that I’ve used a smaller tablet since my Galaxy Note 8.0 back in the Jelly Bean era. While the various 4:3/9.7” Galaxy Tab S’s were a pretty perfect size, the worst thing that I can say after 5 years with the 11” iPad Pro is that it’s not the device to reach for when compact or one handed operation is called for. But otherwise has been a superb tablet even if its SoC has been getting a bit out moded.

When I used Android tablets, I always favored the smaller ones or found them the best compromise between a phone and a laptop form factor. Phablets and large phones are just not large enough, and at least in Android land, typically fall short of the magic 7” crossing point that lead to tablet layouts being supported. Can’t say I’ve ever been impressed with the “Tablet” support of iOS, but the Mini 7 at least delivers the tablet layouts and is vastly superior to my phone.

Floppies still refuse to kick the bucket

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Reading the Ars article, “San Francisco to pay $212 million to end reliance on 5.25-inch floppy disks“, I couldn’t help but think, “At least they’re not the 8-inch kind,” and ironically enough the article ends with a reference to just such a case.

Growing up in an the era I did, our computer relied on 5 1/4″ floppy diskettes and I didn’t really experience the stiff 3.5″ disks until after both the Pentium and the Internet came into vogue. But it’s actually pretty odd to encounter the even older 8″ variety, since those tend to land closer to the CP/M era than the DOS era of computing.

Actually, the two salvaged Weatherstar diskettes displayed in my study may be the only 8″ diskettes I’ve seen in the wild. Even then the format was ancient. Heck, when my family was buying still 5 1/4″ disks from the school supply store for our Tandy, 3.5″ were already long since the mainstream floppy media.

PowerBook 5300

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One of those cases of “Yeah, I must be crazy, but ….” and it turns out that I am the proud owner of another PowerBook. Also a StyleWriter 1200 that came with it at auction.

The 5300 series is one that I’ve always been fascinated with, ever since I saw Jeff Goldblum in Independence Day. Less the uploading a virus to the an alien mothership (serious, do they run Java or something?), and more the scene outside the Whitehouse. I always thought the idea of the expansion bay was cool, and felt a bit disappointed that no one ever really created much in the way of that. But I guess, you’re not supposed to triangulate cellphone positions with a laptop even if that’s something “All cable repairmen can, Pops,” but I felt it would be cool if someone hooked them up to science equipment while exploring a jungle or working in an electronics lab. In reality of course, such use cases for laptops often had a more common answer: serial ports and PCMCIA to serial, and today it’s USB to serial. Special expansion bays pretty much died in the 1990s, and those that didn’t became quite plain in 2000s era business notebooks.

Amazingly the machine is in great shape. The port cover is missing one leg but clips on, which is still practically a unicorn in a field of four-leaf clovers. Seems the display housing is starting to split a bit, but unlike most that I’ve encountered isn’t broken to hell in a hand basket, and the frame is in great shape rather than looking like it was thrown out of a helicopter at hover. This machine feels more like a vintage princess.

Sadly the battery had begun to leak, resulting in having to clean out the battery bay. Fortunately it appears to have gone only as far as the terminals and lip area. Plus it’s a post recall NiMH, so I guess it’s a copper sulfate problem instead of oh-shit-lithium. Initial cleaning with baking soda/vinegar seems to have gone well, and we’ll go a deeper round once I’ve got time to take it apart. No sign of anything being harmed.

Ironically, the hard drive still works. I can’t tell if it’s an original or not until I take it apart, but I wouldn’t be surprised. The 8+16=24 MB memory configuration is one that Apple sold for the 5300cs, and I’ve yet to see any signs that the machine was ever taken apart or abused. The only signs of abuse I’ve been able to see are copies of Microsoft Office and Netscape Communicator, but I suppose that Word 6 on a 100 MHz “P6” chip would be less of a bear than it is on my Duo’s Motorola 68030.

One thing that I especially love is the keyboard. It’s beautiful to type on, and still perfectly smooth and limber. I can type so fast that the hard drive eventually spins down, parks the head, and then has a lag spike as it spins back up to page the file to disk. By contrast my 1992 Duo has a keyboard where the keys often stick, or need to be pressed multiple times to register.

Yeah this is a good machine. But I may be out of my mind 🤪

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While I can’t say that I never noticed the ABCs joke at the time, I will admit to laughing in retrospect. Reboot was a series that I enjoyed a lot as a kid, one that I always lamented its exit. Just about any chance as a kid, I caught the reruns when I could.

Can’t say that I ever imagined it would face such insanity. Kids shows kind of cleaned up by the 90s, I guess. But when you get to the point that you can’t even say the word hockey, I have to wonder what the hell the censors were thinking. I always assumed that Dot was designed that way, but this video made me glad that they never touched Hex, because Hex was cool (and perhaps a mixture of sweet and psychotic wrapped up in a multiple personality disorder).

While the game cubes that occasionally loaded lead to references to films targeted at adult audiences, such as Mad Max and Evil Dead, the show really wasn’t that bad. Heck, far worse than Reboot certainly aired. Having played the PlayStation game they reference, I would say that it wasn’t very violent or dark compared to many games on the platform at the time but I digress.

Which also makes me remember eons ago when G.I. Joe had a brief rerun on Cartoon Network, allowing me to revisit the series when I was a teenager. It’s a series that I tend to think of as a good hallmark for the era that I grew up in. Episodes of G.I. Joe often involved considerable violence, like I never thought about it as a little boy but at a teenager it was more like wow, how can no one die or be seriously hurt with this much action!? Another aspect that I often look back upon is that cartoons of that era often ended with some kind of moral story or positive advice woven into the plot or as ancillary matter, or as Flint and company used to say, “And knowing is half the battle!”

By contrast, kids shows that came out later in my childhood or afterwards tended to gravitate towards either pumping you full of facts and figures like a text book, or may have intentionally be aimed at rotting your brain. Reboot on the other hand was a show that entertained me a lot as a kid, and that I always found a fascinating concept–it was a fairly good choice of McGuffin having games “Drop” on city blocks, and surprisingly original. While the notion of being “Good” may have been woven into it, often times it focused more on the adventure.

Victoria of Many Faces, Vol. 1 (light novel)

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I read Victoria of Many Faces largely because I enjoyed one of the author’s other books, Soup Forest, and decided to pre-order the moment that Amazon notified me about the coming title. It turned out to be an excellent choice, and I almost binge read the book in about two or three sittings. In fact, the only reason it took three days is because I decided on the second, that I really did need to sleep 😅.

Victoria is perhaps one of the more interesting light novel characters that I’ve encountered. Fleeing the organization, she ends up settling in another country and becomes embroiled in various antics–which eventually lead to her efforts to lie low becoming more complicated as time goes on. But we see a character who’s done some not-so-great things choosing to deviate from what they were trained to do because they choose to follow their heart. Even from the very beginning, Victoria recognizes that her course of action would be ill-advised and if she were still an operative would have to avoid the risks that it incurs. Faced with that, Victoria makes her own choice about what is right and that moral compass sets her on a beautiful course.

I love that the actions Victoria takes are her choice, and often bring about the major shifts in the plot. As a light novel, Victoria of Many Faces is often amusing and intriguing, and honestly I laughed so hard during the pub scene with the cat….I love so much that it’s even captured by one of the illustrations. The follow up in the bakery was superb, with there “Don’t you want to ask me something? / Do you want me to ask? / No” moment ending with the two laughing like loons. It’s very much like a shared story over cake, and plays off the incident with such comedic beauty.

Throughout the story, Victoria’s interactions with other people define what becomes the new “Normal” for her. By making it a slice of life tale, I think the story captures well why such shifts in Victoria’s life lead her towards finding happiness in such unlikely actions.

The ending in particular was rather beautiful, and after having seen several of the character’s aliases and efforts at concealing her true identity, Victoria’s exchange with the captain is especially poignant at the end. I’m glad that when all is said and done, she is able to reveal both her true self and the name hidden behind it all.

Overall, I would say that the protagonist is more realistic than most LN characters tend to be while remaining a vehicle for the story, and that makes her a wonderful counter-point to the various antics she gets wrapped up in. Victoria of Many Faces becomes a fairly warm slice of life / action comedy with a bit of romance here and there as the volume progresses, and it works really well IMHO.

I’m rather looking forward to the second volume, and hope that it proves as entertaining as the first was.

Ramblings of an insane nerd

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The concept™️ 

Mp3Tag (Mac rather than Win in my case) for managing metadata. Cover art is a weak point for something like Quod Libet that I would otherwise choose, and the Mac version is broken on modern systems, meaning I would have to break out my 17 year old ThinkPad to run the FlatPak, or suffer X Forwarding or similar grumbles with restoring my 12 year old Latitude to its Debian glory days. Thus indie software wins this scenario because MacBook Air.

Good ol’ ffmpeg for audio conversions. I’m really not a fan of hand-wrangling ffmpeg, and don’t want to mess with it for cover art purposes. It’s like a grizzly bear wielding a Swiss army knife when it comes to esoteric video muxing and complex encodes, which are a pain. But I’m content to use it for transcoding audio. The open question is whether I want to load ffmpeg on one of my Linux server’s virtual machines, or just brew install ffmpeg while drinking a root beer.

These both solve the problems that exist between my existing music collection, and what Apple Music can offer in the ways of managing a personal music library like it’s still two thousand ‘ought something.

Apple Music is still combat effective for ripping CDs, since I actually like the iTunes+ format of MP4 + AAC 256K and it does a passable job of fetching metadata. It’s just after the disc is ripped, we’re done.

The file server for warehousing data. I’ve mostly followed the pattern of collecting content in its various forms under Music, while backups exist imaginatively under Backups. Things will probably become divided either by format or purpose, such as FLAC, M4A or Library, Player directories in place of the existing “Artist – Album” structure. I might debate between the old media depot under Backups getting reorganized or moving to a dedicated “Originals” structure organized by source (CD, Steam, iTunes, Amazon, Google, yada, yada) on my Music share. One of the advancements over the past decade is its no longer just “Backups” and individual hosts that gets backed up regularly, but the entire file server’s shares where LAN data lives.

This path of insanity makes a good excuse to start normalizing my approach to dealing with cover art, lyrics, and readme files pertaining to music–but are a smaller problem than ensuring sane song metadata and library structure. Enforcing a tag editor centric data flow is also a good reason to make for easily saving/loading metadata from disk.

I’m also thinking that for a general approach to normalization, making MP4/AAC the standard lossy format with FLAC as the lossless where applicable. One of those things that has changed over the past decade and a half, is I’ve no real reason to prefer MP3/320K over AAC/256 or WAV over FLAC. Software compatibility for decoders (unless perhaps, you’re a damn iPod or the like) just isn’t a problem like it was in the early days of AAC, and there’s no real reason to treat the hax that ID3 evolved from and WAV is basically the software equal of a 3.5mm analog jack this side of FLAC.

Yup, let’s just say the iPod experiment finally drove me over the hill ^(o_o)^