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Blink And You Miss It

Well whoops, here I wanted to be more consistent with blogging things, and I forgot to do stuff with it again!

And I'm not particularly gonna write a whole lot right now. This whole year's been wild, and theres a lot that I could talk about, but I'm not gonna particularly go into everything right now. But short version of things I will mention about especially the last calendar year is: NaNoWriMo last year got me really excited with the story I was writing, and led me to wanting to do more with it, so after it ended I started diving straight away into making a Visual Novel with it. Starting to make that got me really excited to do gamedev for the first time in a while, ever since the project that was consuming all my time in 2019. That in turn led me to working on other games as well, and then fixing up and submitting bugs with the Godot plugin I was using for the Visual Novel, Dialogic, and then a complete rewrite of the plugin for Godot 4 led me to contributing more and more to the project, until eventually I just became part of the core dev team.

Now we're at the beginning of NaNoWriMo for this year. And I'm still really into the story I started last year with the Visual Novel. What I wrote last year was the first part of this original block of the timleine in this bigger story, which I had vaguely outlined long ago but never really had any details. So for this year NaNoWriMo I'm gonna continue freewriting the rest of this part of the story to flesh it completely out. May not get it all finished in the month, we'll see. I'll report more back on that when the month's over.

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On The Topic Of Guilt

I mentioned before that one of the reasons I had stopped blogging for four years was the death of one of my close friends, and the circumstances around it. And I had mentioned that I had made a Reddit post talking about it, and probably would repost that here when I did. At the time there was nothing more to think about then that. But the actual Reddit post I made in question was primarily a discussion thread of the game Doki Doki Literature Club, which suddenly became relevant again now because of the new expanded version that just got released, Doki Doki Literature Club Plus. So, well, I guess that's relevant discussion now, so I should go ahead and repost that topic now instead of waiting even longer.

Because the thread is both spoilers for DDLC, and actual content warning for the topic of suicide, I'm going to put it behind a spoilers block. I had to add additional functionality to my blog to be able to support this in the RSS feed to filter out the tag so spoilers/content warnings don't show up elsewhere in news feeds, which I started a while back but only finished now to post this right now.

The rest of this entry is how I originally posted it on Reddit on 7 December, 2017:

This entry has spoilers or sensitive content and it is not included in the RSS feed, please visit the website to view this part

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Name Meaning of a Real Person

Following up last entry about name etymology, let's do another one, and this time for my own name. This one's another one from my old list of entries to write. And it's probably the beginning of the list, the oldest thing on there that I'd yet to write, because it came to me when I was was doing a full watch of Lost. That was several task lists ago so I don't have a date on the note creation exactly, but I think that was summer of 2015.

When it comes to names, and particularly my name, one thing that comes to mind more often is not Lost, but actually Stargate. I think its brought up a few times over the course of the show, but there's one particular scene that comes to mind where Daniel Jackson explains the meaning of the name, which is 'God is my judge'. With that setting the stage, we move onto Lost, and the character of Daniel Faraday. I can't find any Youtube clips of this one offhand, but I had made this note to write this because of several times in Lost where - without any further addressing of it - he would be called Dan by someone and he would correct them that it's Daniel.

There is a particular reason for this, when you think about name etymology. Dan isn't simply just a diminuitive form of the name Daniel, but also has additional meanings of its own. Even in the same language origin, Daniel has similar meaning in Hebrew as Dan, but they have different origins. Both are Biblical names, but Dan (where by itself just means 'judge') is the name of one of the tribes of Israel, whereas Daniel comes much later, and is most famously associated with the man thrown to the lions. Myself, I was named particularly for that person. And in the Bible, Dan, the head of the tribe, is described as to be the judge of his tribe members, which is itself rather far from the meaning of Daniel, honestly. And that's just one of the etymologies of Dan, because there's also Dan's with English and Scandanavian origins.

As consequence, of course, there's people with particulars for the name. For Daniel Faraday in Lost, for Daniel Jackson in Stargate, and for myself. For me, it's kind of a special sticking point, just because for some reason ever since I'm a kid everyone's always called me by my last name, rather than my first. It's somewhat inevitable with people I'm friends with, and there's no avoiding that, but if it's not an aquaintenace then if I get asked for a preference than I will say Daniel. There are some friends that do call me Dan, including another one who specifically himself has Dan as his preference, but what I actually consider to be my name goes by the meaning of the name. I am Daniel, and God is my judge.

Also it's not 'Danielle', Mr. Whatever-your-name-was French teacher in my Jr High that also did the detentions. I don't care that it's 'a nice distinguished French name', my name is Hebrew, thank you very much.

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Name Meaning of a Fictional Person

Long, long ago, back when I started playing Final Fantasy XI in 2004, I created a character, a simple human woman named Exelia. I've reused this character multiple times, in multiple video games, in D&D campaigns, and in stories I've written, all based on this same character and the archetype that's built over time for her.

When I first created the character, I didn't actually have anything in mind. The way Final Fantasy XI worked back then, you couldn't choose what server your character started on, it was assigned randomly. There was a way to get onto a specific server by getting a code from someone else already on that server, and I was planning on playing with some friends, but had a day before they could get me a code where I just played a throwaway character on a server to learn the controls and such. For the name of the character, I used the games built-in name generator, hitting that a bunch of times until I found something I liked. It was not Exelia at this point, though.

After I had the name, and since I had some free time, I had started just creating and deleting my character over and over, trying to land on the server I wanted to naturally. I never did, but I did find something else doing that: since the game every character name had to be unique, and you only had one name (the next Final Fantasy MMO, XIV, added a surname as well so there was less collision), and some of the servers I tried I couldn't join because someone else already had that name. I ended up rearranging the letters of the name, ending up with Exelia. At the time, according to what I could find on the internet, this was not a real name, either of a person or a business (since then a few businesses and a Youtuber have popped up with that name).

But.... Turns out that it isn't a fake name at all. Every so often, as I would make up new characters and look up name etymologies, I would try searching for a theoretical etymology for the name Exelia. And one day, suddenly there was a forum thread on a site discussing it as a real name. In this thread, someone looking at their family tree found the name belonging to their great grandmother, and was wondering about the meaning themselves. The thread has some discussion as they tried researching it, finding a few more instances of the name in 19th century Quebec, but since it was obscure and apparently localized to that region they couldn't come to a firm conclusion for origin.

Their best guess for the name was derived from the Latin word meaning 'to excel'. Another theory was that it derives from the hymn Gloria in excelsis Deo, with excelsis meaning 'the highest'. Either one is an interesting theory, but for the particular women in question who knows which it would be (or even something different) without anyone having family records from the time which talked about the meaning.

Of course, by the time I made this discovery, I had long since had to come up with a surname for the character. I had done it in a mind blank moment when creating my XIV character the first time, and used the name Antonov as I was working on my short story The Pocketwatch at the time and that was the only surname that came to mind. I then canonized it by writing her into a book as the younger sister of the Fiole Antonov character. So now she's a Russian woman with what we've now learned is a French Canadian given name. Ah well.

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Educational Game - Mystery Solved

I've been meaning to write this one for a long time. It's part of my old list of articles to write from before I stopped doing anything with the blog in 2016.

So, long, long ago, I wrote a entry about some educational games at my elementary school, called Twist-A-Plotz, that I could never find any more information on. Every so often I would do searches when I remembered, and eventually I did finally find some information. Some random forum thread, where someone dug up a bunch of them and started backing them up and cracking them to remove the copy protection. It's been so long now since I meant to write this article that the forum that did the work doesn't even exist anymore, so I can't link to the discussion thread of the work, but luckily it did all get uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Turns out it's a software written by Scholastic, a series called Microzine. And the reason I couldn't find it before was because the actual Twist-A-Plotz game was just one of the apps on each Microzine disk, which also has monthly letters section and other things. And these aren't all exactly what I had in my school, either. All of these disks that were recovered and archived are Apple II software, where the school was running a network of IBM x86 machines (some 286's and some 386's). My guess, since Scholastic is the developers/publishers, is that Scholastic distributed the Microzine product to end users and schools still running Apple II machines, but also provided standalone x86 ports of the Twist-A-Plotz portions to schools that had replaced their Apple II's.

Unless my school happened to have some Apple II emulation going on on their x86 machines. Somehow, there in the mid 90s.

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Look At All This MIDI - Part 2

Look at this. Look at this wonderful UI. This the Korg M1 UI (this screenshot being the iM1 app in particular):

From working with iM1, I began to understand more and more complex patch creation that I hadn't before, such as the LA synthesis from the MT-32 I had bought years earlier. And I wanted more to play with. I began to amass some more hardware, building out a rack with multiple units in it. With the MT-32 now crazy pricy, I sold that off for much more than I originally bought it for, instead grabbing a roughly equivalent D-110. I also got newer Roland JV-2080, and a few expansion cards, and a Korg Triton Rack. Soon I had amassed a massively complex setup of multiple rackmount units, a mixer, a MIDI switch, and more... And that became a hassle I quickly grew tired of.

It was time to downsize. I gradually sold off all the hardware (except the D-110, because nobody wants to buy those), replacing it all with one single unit: the Roland Integra-7. The Integra-7 is a superset of their JV line, with the internal ROM of the XV-5080, and every single commercial expansion board ever made for it, as well as another set of un-editable presets on a special expansion ROM (including another return of the Touhou fandom's favorite patch RomanticTp, which I also since learned originated from one of the JV expansion boards before ZUN made it famous in the SD-90). The full JV library is all I was originally interested in, but it also has a second synthesizer engine that's meant for much more realistic natural instrument sounds. And it also has a third synthesis engine too, a Virtual Analogue synthesizer, which gives even more options. Way more than I was expecting to get out of it originally, it really is an insanely nice all-in-one unit, that's going on more than eight years of being manufactured because Roland's not made anything to succeed it.

Because I do travel a lot (or, well, did, stupid pandemic), there's a number of software plugins I use as well as the Integra. I've still got the SC-VA which I use occasionally, as well as the Korg Gadget collection of plugins, and their software Triton which they introduced last year. Additionally there's a few more retro plugins I use when I want to make older-style sound, such as a few chip simulators, a VST emulating the Ensoniq SQ-80, and there's a VST version of the Munt MT-32 emulator, too. I've got a number of songs that use multiples of those together, which sometimes my DAW doesn't like and crashes and I have to reload a few times until it opens correctly (not actually sure which plugin exactly is the offending one). The particularly nice thing is working together with the Integra-7, because that's an ASIO device so I can route sound out from my DAW into it to play together with the Integra, and while I only just recently finished the setup for this, I can have everything playing out from the Integra through my monitor speakers without a complicated setup like with my previous rack hardware.

There's a couple more pieces of hardware I have still: keyboards. Before I sold the Triton Rack back off again, I needed a replacement screen for it, because I bought it cheap as-is/parts only because it had bad lines. I had originally found a local listing for a Korg Karma and saw it had the same screen, and was going to buy it and swap them, but it sold before that. But as I read about that keyboard, being a Triton engine together with a crazy music generator, that sounded interesting on its own, so I bought one from an online dealer. The Karma engine is cool, but really complicated to use, and I've been on-again-off-again interested with it, and right now I'm sitting at not interested anymore and want to sell it off again. I also threw in the EXB-MOSS virtual analogue board in the Karma, after originally buying it for the Triton Rack and holding onto it, and while that's a crazy board and part of why I kept holding onto the Karma, I'm ready to part with it (but if Korg makes a VST version of tht unit someday I'll be dropping for it in a heartbeat).

The second keyboard I don't have as much of an excuse for. Last year in summer going pandemic stir crazy led me to buying a Roland FA-06, which is basically a keyboard with a stripped down version of the Integra-7's three engines. That doesn't really give me any benefit though, being a little nicer to edit patches directly on the unit than it is on the Integra's tiny screen, but more limited in ROM size so only 2 expansions can be loaded at once, so I finally got over it and will sell it again. Because of their bulky size, I don't want to try and ship them, so both keyboards are waiting for until I feel safe selling them locally because of the pandemic. Hopefully soon I can get vaccinated.

Maybe somebody will want the D-110 then, too.

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Look At All This MIDI - Part 1

Let's shift gears for a bit and talk about music. And more particularly, MIDI and such devices that I've owned for making music.

I grew up owning a Commodore 64, and knew the basics of synthesis from the manuals of that, but never had any tools for working with it. When I was a teenager was about the whole time when the internet was getting started, and MIDI's were the thing as it was before the MP3 and during the days of dialup. Our family computer wsa a Packard Bell, with a custom sound card/modem called the Aztech 2320. It had two MIDI playback modes, a built-in OPL3, and a software wavetable that was licensed by Packard Bell, but I think a version of Brookstree Wavestream. I didn't discover this software wavetable until a few years after we owned the computer, and after being accustomed to just OPL FM music, oh boy did the "real" instruments of the wavetable blow my mind.

In my 9th grade year, I was gifted another computer from a neighbor who had just finished up some computer coursework at is college. It was an NEC, but by that point NEC and Packard Bell were one company, so it had similar hardware as the family computer, including the same Aztech 2320. He originally was using it with Linux, but I didn't understand it at the time so reimaged it with the Packard Bell's image disc, and gained access to the Wavestream wavetable. From some random shareware disc, I think, I found a software for editing MIDIs, and then I first started to dabble with that.

As the years went on, into my adult life, as Windows moved on the standard Windows GS wavetable came around, but it's not all that great. I still kept the old computer around just for the other wavetable software, when I wanted to use it, but that's a hassle to work with so wanted to find some other thing. Somewhere around 2011-2012, I discovered the Roland MT-32. This was far before the retro gaming computer scene emerged, and MT-32's were something nobody wanted, so I picked up one for dirt cheap, but found the LA synthesis engine interesting but complicated to work with, and it didn't sound as good as I hoped, so I ended up shelving it.

Being that I'm a Touhou fan, this is where the Studio Canvas line of course enters. The fandom is obsessed with the SD-90, the device ZUN uses for composing, and trying to make things sound like his work. I became interested too, but not for the same reason. I simply didn't know there was any modern hardware like that anymore, thought it was all late-80s/early-90s stuff like the MT-32 and the SC-55 or the Yamaha MU-80. The original Studio Canvas line has three versions: the SD-20, SD-80, and SD-90. Each one served a different purpose: the SD-20 was a pared down version with the wavetable, but without any aftereffects units, limiting it to only the General MIDI 2 standard of chorus/reverb settings. The SD-80 adds 3 FX units, and the SD-90 also adds external connections for microphone/guitar/aux audio processing as well. I ended up going for the SD-20, just because of what I was looking for, which got some scoffing from a few others in the Touhou fandom (least of which was for them thinking it was inferior for having "less" presets than the SD-80/90, but one of the banks of presets on the larger devices is simply existing voices with preconfigured FX units, so there's nothing actually lost that post-processing elsewhere can't do anyway). A few years later, though, I traded it up for a SD-90 anyway, wanting to have the on-hand FX units rather than post-processing ones on the computer (though when I first got it I didn't even understand what most of the effects even did) and finding one for a great deal that was much less than what they usually sold for. To have an additional sound set from Yamaha, I also bought the MU-128 which was near the top of the line for Yamaha's offerings. I considered Korg's equivalent offering as well, the NS5R, but never did find one at a price I wanted to pay. Somewhere in here I also bought an SC-88, although I don't remember why exactly, then sold it off to a coworker (without the power supply, because the one that came with it was bad but it used the same one as the MT-32 so I just used that).

Some years later, I picked up an iPad, mainly for use when on planes rather than trying to use a bulky laptop in cramped economy tray. On there I discovered the Sound Canvas VA, which is a software recreation of the previous line of Sound Canvases, and particularly the SC-8820. This only had one FX unit, compared to the three with the SD-90, but a much larger and more varied preset list. And when I found that it also existed in a PC version as a VST for DAW usage, that eliminated the FX limit because multiple instances can be run. At that point, honestly, I lost interest in the SD-90 and wanted to use SC-VA going forward, so I eventually sold off the SD-90, netting more than I paid for it since I had bought it at a steal price originally.

On the iPad I also eventually found something else, too: Korg iM1. Another software recreation, this time of Korg's M1 workstation from 1988. The M1 was not simply a preset device, but was designed to let you custom edit the sound patches to be exactly how you wanted. I had dabbled with a few things over the years that were like that, but beyond the basics of ADSR that I had learned from Commodore days, I could never really wrap my head around them. But Korg iM1 was different. Because it has an absolutely beautiful layout, that breaks it all down perfectly to understand.

To be continued in part 2...

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Four-Year Summary

So there are a number of reasons that I didn't update the blog for the last four years, but there were a few big ones that stopped me where I did left off and not get back to it. Let me break them down.

Death of a friend

One of my closest friends died about a week before my last entry. That did not exactly put me in the best of spaces for a while, particularly because of the circumstances. I have talked some about it on a thread on Reddit, and will probably repost that on here sometime later, so for now I'll not go into it further for now.

CMS Failure

The old blog/CMS software I was previously using, PivotX, had actually long since ended by that point. The final maintenance release was June of 2015. I had been running on that system since the beginning, or rather an older version of it simply titled Pivot, and it was really starting to show issues with that age with various weird bugs on the site. The developers of PivotX had moved on to start a new CMS, called Bolt, and I had actually started the process to convert over to that, but there was some issues with running it on my server with some configuration items that are on by my host being recommended to be off with whatever combinations of frameworks they were using to make Bolt. As I worked on this on and off, there were long periods of time where there was no talk and no update from the Bolt devs, and the future of it was uncertain, and that kind of drove me away from finishing the migration.

Other Projects

For about a year and a half, I was actually doing some major contract project maintaining a high-traffic site. Since I work full time, this means all my spare time was done working on this project and its feature development and maintenance, and so any spare time where I was working on that I had no interest in other programming, either something for this blog or any game development, with what free time I had. Once that contract ended, then I had time to start looking into more stuff. Which led right into...

2020

What else to say? We all know how that dumpster fire went. My previous contract had ended around January of 2020, and so I only had a little time to start diving into other things before the world turned upside down. What's worse, early in 2020 I had started some new dieting, and so I was trying to adjust to that and the differences in how I felt because of that as the pandemic began. Then there was a major earthquake in Salt Lake City in the middle of March. A 5.7 scale one for the initial, with major aftershocks of 4 and 4.5 that same day as well as many smaller ones. That earthquake day hectically getting all my team at work ready to be able to work from home and going around and making sure the equipment was set in place to not be damaged from further earthquakes, as that was pretty much the day that they made the sure call that they were building up to as pandemic ramping up of everyone had to be set to work from home that day, building was closed after that. And for the first few weeks or so of that, I felt sick and really tired. Doesn't seem like I had Covid at that time, based on some later antibody tests I took for a study, but between just general earthquake anxiety and maybe something else I caught around then, I was not well for a while after pandemic started.

That's the four major things that happened before. As I started feeling better again last year, and could focus on doing stuff again, I decided to try and work on getting my blog back up and running again. After the experiences with the previous blog going EOL and not getting updates, and the general idea that it's bad to let web software languish because of how often security vulnerabilities come up with old not-updated software, I decided for a different approach. I already didn't have comments turned on, so there was no need for a web-based software to begin with. Instead I'd look into an offline CMS, that would just generate static pages for me to upload to the server. And after trying a few but not giving me the exact flexibility I wanted, I ended up deciding to make one myself that met what I wanted.

So that's what I did. I wrote my own offline CMS, which I just completed this week. Still some features I want to add to it over time, but it's usable now. And I'll go more into that work in another post.

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Kept You Waiting, Huh?

Well that was a weird last four years, wasn't it?

This is just a short entry, to make sure my new blog software is completely working. There's a lot of reasons I let the blog go dead for four years, which I'll summarize later, but one of the reasons was needing to replace the CMS. Assuming this test works properly, then I'll be able to start making new entries going forward.

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2016 Book Blitz - November (NaNoWriMo): The Inquisitor

Oh right, I forgot I needed to post this one too. 

Well, that doesn't look good now, does it? Let's take a look at it from NaNoWriMo's perspective.

Well there's the problem. Right there at the beginning of the month, there was hardly any progress for almost four days. That's because I actually had a migraine that lasted that enitre week, which made it really difficult to focus on trying to get any writing done, which made me fall behind for the entire month.

I actually spent a large amount of the month dealing with probably what was a cycle of rebound headaches/migraines, just piling up more and more from the painkillers and migraine abortives. In October and through November the Sumatriptan I had been previously perscribed for abortive that had seemed to be working just stopped, and I was perscribed a new one (SPOILERS: the new one doesn't seem to work either), as well as being put on a preventative as well, topiramate, which actually did seem to help once it did finally ramp up to the full dose. But I also let myself purge of all the painkillers at the same time, to try to break the cycle of the rebounds, and that probably in part has some impact on it as well. 

As we got to the latter half of the month, as you see, I was able to start to finally catch up to par with my actual goal rate from this year, but it took until literally the last day to make it to NaNoWriMo par itself, because of how much the beginning of the month had put me behind. So I barely scooted in at the last minute, but I made it. Not a failed NaNoWriMo yet. Would be a little embarassing to do so this year, too, consideirng I already met the NaNoWriMo challenge three separate months already this year. 

I did finish the book, too. On the first of November, in fact, I blitzed to the end. Ended up coming in at a little over 60k words, so shorter than the overall goal of 75k, but as I was writing the book I didn't really have enough story to write to 75k without making up unnecessary fluff. Actually ended up better than I was originally planning, which is the reason I blitzed to the ending on the last day, because I had an idea come to me as I was heading to bed on the 30th to expand the last chapter a bit, whcih I got up to jot down a note for, then as I was doing that I had another idea come with that that I realized would work well to tie everything together nicely, so I pushed forward the next day so I could write it while it was fresh. 

Four books done for the year. I meant to write this earlier in the month but forgot to, so I'll leave more for the full post-mortem on the year I'll put together tomorrow.

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2016 Book Blitz - June: Spiral Island 3

Oh yeah, I forgot to make this entry. I made the image for it and then forgot to do the rest. Not much to say here, really. Fell short of the goal, and spent the month back and forth falling ahead and behind par. Last few days of the month I had a ton of prep before going out of town for a business trip, so I fell behind then. I had hoped to catch up to reach par on the 30th during my five hour flights in the day, but I got sick partway through the flights and couldn't do any more writing from that point, so I only got that day's worth of words done by that point. 

I didn't end up finishing Spiral Island 2 in May, because I ended up further spending the beginning half of May still sick as I got a bad cold after my infection died away, and with all of the prep for the big Pokemon tournament that month and being sick I didn't have much time or energy. I got close, actually, with only two more chapters at the end left to write, and two I had skipped as well: one near the beginning that's mostly a public speech and I didn't want to take the time making that sound properly like a business speech, and another one that took place in Japan that I wanted to have access to Street View maps to get a better picture of what I was doing, but as I got to that point I wasn't in a place I had good internet access so I skipped it and moved on. So I finished the end of May not finished with Spiral Island 2, but needing to move on to start Spiral Island 3, so I decided to move on. 

If I hadn't gotten as far as I did, though, I wouldn't have moved on. Starting with Spiral Island 1, as I mentioned, I had to make changes in the plot to make it work with the lore. This continued snowballing more through the course of writing Spiral Island 2. Because of all of this, the entire course of the trilogy had changed. The story and the events are still the same, pretty much, but the reasons why everyting happened, to make it all make sense, changed. Because of that, because the way the third book progresses, if I hadn't figured out how the climax of book two was set once I hit June I wouldn't have been able to start the third one and would have had to continue writing it into June before I could start. Luckily, I was able to get it to a point I finally had an idea of the conclusion and everything was going with last minute writing on Memorial Day, so I was able to move on.

Beyond that, I still haven't finished book two. Because I still haven't finished book three. By chapter count, according to my outlines, Spiral Island 1 was 22 chapters, Spiral Island 2 was 30 chapters, and Spiral Island 3 is 40 chapters. The reason that worked out that way is mostly because there's more than one point of view being monitored in the second and third books, as opposed to the first book being almost solely from one character's view, as well as with the third book there's a lot of things happening. It's still a subset of the gameplay whenever I finally get to making the games, as all three only go into points actually important to moving along the story in a book and not points important to moving along the story as a game and other gameplay things, but there are more plot points important to the books as we move on so it naturally needed to be longer for each.

I've been kind of slacking since I got back from my business trip, and not writing as much as I should have (and you can partly blame that on the release of Pokemon Go), so I'm not quite done yet. With the word count at the end of June, I had finished up to chapter 26. As of this writing I've finished chapter 32, with a word count of 88775, so I'm getting close. I'm hoping to finish it up over the course of the next week, then swing back to catch the missing four chapters of book two after that so I can get my first pass editing done and have a first draft print done by the time I go out of town again mid-August. The end is in sight, culminating a total of fifteen years of work to bring this trilogy into the world (although I hand't really considered the print form to do it for nearly as long, honestly).

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Eliza’s Notes - 08: Age of Regression

Oddly enough, in a way the present day seems the most like Ildios to me. 

Not exactly like it, of course. We were more advanced than the way the world is right now through our more extensive use of magic. But in our day there were of course remnants of the Aughylian Empire around that nobody could use, ancient mystical technology that was simply collected and traded among the rich because it couldn't be activated. Whereas here it's everywhere, littered among ruined cities and thrown in gorges and rivers just to get it out of the way, but still otherwise just as mystical. And just as unusable. 

Society regressed once more. The wars of supplies led to much of the world's knowledge being destroyed in the crossfire, and as waves of people died out everything fell back to simple farming once more. So much lost, it hurts them to hear of it, as the eldest of the people alive tell stories to their youngest descendants, told to them by their eldest forefathers while they were at their youngest, of the way it was during the end days while the supplies were dwindling but the technology was still in use. 

I think what hurts this people more than anything else is that they can still see it all. They can see the road vehicles lying on the ruined streets, they can see the air vehicles lying in the fields where they fell from the sky and were too heavy to move. Scavengers search ruins of the cities for scrap metals and wood and tools that can be put to use in some way, and they all see all the wonderful conveniences of the past that can no longer be used anymore. For most of them, they don't even know how many of these things were even used, and their guesses can get interestingly wild. It hurts them that they know, they can see for themselves that the world used to be a better place, and there's nothing they can do about it. 

They live now in a simulacrum of what was lost, scrambling to be like how its told in the stories. Approximations of technologies of the past are used as best as they can. Animal drawn carts, both on free wheels and drawn along set path rails. Flame based lighting, either from candles or piped in gas where available. Where available, food is kept cool in boxes filled with ice, or in places where ice is not available in containers taking advantage of the evaporative cooling properties of water. To the people, though, it's seen as just an approximation, a reach toward the past that has been lost to them. Most don't realize that either they have either invented new technology to do the tasks without magic, or reinvented technology that already existed in the past that was then modified to work with magic when the crystals were created.  They could certainly do worse, as far as levels of technology are concerned. If only they would realize that they are looking toward the future, and not looking back to the past. 

Interestingly enough, the biggest advance has actually been the Evreux. With devastations to their underground systems, they had to go through and rebuild much of their infrastructure, giving them opportunity to overhaul and expand it. Using some of the technology we saved, combined with other technology they retained from the height of their civilization, they've created more advanced trains and other vehicles, increasing in speed and allowing for much faster travel between their settlements, as well as adding additional redundancy and alternate paths just in case something like before happens again. All of it based on more advanced technology and materials that require much less maintenance than before, allowing much easier use of the vast underground network.  

Along with expansion of their networks, they've also expanded their own underground towns and cities. With their belief that leaving the planet will lead them to disaster once again, they've adopted the idea since the time I first met them that expanding further into the underground will bring them more in tune with nature and the planet. They've developed new technologies to allow them to more easily grow food underground, which has allowed them to expand their population, and with it required them to build larger and more complex underground cities. Now complexes around key rail stations have expanded that can hold up to a thousand in them, or more as they expand further. Although, to their credit, they're not abandoning the surface, and have a policy of compulsory service among their people of living topside to grow and hunt for a time period so they better understand where they came from and where they are going.  

They've also taken the more advanced medical techniques and continued pushing them forward, again combined with their technology of the past. Implants and limb replacements have gone from clearly mechanical to indistinguishable from regular flesh, and requiring much less maintenance. Enhancements to supplement what has been lost by age are commonplace now. Age hasn't been kind to me myself, but thanks to several surgeries by highly skilled experts I've had knees and hips replaced, and enhancements to my musculature and nervous system to allow me the freedom of movement that I once had when I was much younger. I still look like an old woman, but in combat I would no longer move like one, something which would be sure to confuse anyone wishing to stand against me. 

As they've been expanding their technology, being the only human living among them has been... a little difficult. Their size compared to mine means some things are not well built for someone of my height, making things a little cramped for travel. Such as their rail cars, I have to more often sit on the ground to keep from bumping my head in the small trains traveling from city to the next. It's a good thing the trains are much faster than they used to be.

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[regularspelling]

Eliza’s Notes - 07: Age of Enmity

The idyllic society we have been living in was bound to fall sooner or later. Human nature is far too dark to keep such a peaceful society forever, after all. As soon as conditions began to change everything spirals out of control until it falls apart. And this time, just the same, the fall was brought about by human nature and its selfishness.

As society grew ever more advanced from its use of crystal powered technology, more and more stress began being placed on the mothercrystals. Patches and repairs to their structures were being made, but they continued being taxed more and more until it could be done no more. First the Air mothercrystal shattered, exploding and firing shards all around. Its remote location meant it was mostly an ignored issue, people passing it off as lack of proper maintenance. Then the Water mothercrystal shattered. Then Fire, then Earth. Then Ice, Lightning, and Shadow. Faster and faster with each new mothercrystal that shattered when finally Mind and Vitae shattered almost simultaneously.

The people figured they could just rebuild new mothercrystals, the shattering simply an unavoidable result of the age of the structures. Nothing lasts forever, after all, was their guess after the third one was destroyed. Energy could still be harvested from the shattered pieces to supplement supply while the new ones were under construction. But as they set up the latticework for the new Air mothercrystal, even while others were still shattering around the world, they found that they couldn't. Records and notes from the time of their creation had been neglected over the years, as people in the past figured that they would last forever and so hadn't bothered keeping all the records straight. In the end, nobody knew how to recreate them. The knowledge of how the mothercrystals were created was lost, and now so too were they.

The fallout from this was swift. As supplies began to dwindle, people began to hoard them. Countries went to war with each other to capture stores of crystals. Armies quickly spent their own crystal supply in efforts to capture their enemies crystal supplies, which they were themselves spending to do the same. And the civilians - cut off from easy access to crystals as their governments hoarded them for their wars - didn't fare much better. Cities went dark. Regulated food stores spoiled. Friendships shattered just the same as the mothercrystals had. Neighbor became wary of neighbor as they hoarded and protected their own crystal stores. Households that didn't have storage of crystals quickly fell to having nothing and being despised beggars or hated theives.

The Evreux too suffered greatly. While they had integrated little of the crystal technology developed on the overworld into their own lifestyle - and what of it that they did could be easily converted back to running on electricity once more - their rail network was devastated by the armies of the surface as supply lines would be cut off or captures to gain crystal stores. To their credit, the Evreux for the most part don’t have hatred or contempt for the races of Aughylia, but simply pity. Pity that we're so quick to fall into such horrible behavior and not learn to be at peace. A pity that they couldn’t come together to solve the problem and instead let it drive a wedge between them.

With the world as volatile as it is right now I’ve had to retreat once more, hiding from public view. The Evreaux consider me a friend and freely let me travel around their tunnels and rails, and so I’m able to come and go around the world as best as I can with the damaged rail lines, but the surface world right now would be too suspicious of an old woman such as myself traveling around alone, and I’m liable to get attacked by people trying to rob me. Not that I can’t defend myself easily from basically everything they could throw at me, between my own magic and my staff and other weapons I carry around with me, but it is of course far simpler to just avoid trouble than it is to try to get out of it. I’m immortal, not invulnerable. I haven’t lived this long by being reckless. That’s James’s way of life, not mine.

One exception to my policy of avoiding, though, has been records. There’s been a lot of important technologies developed in the last while - medical technologies especially - since the advent of the crystals, and I’ve felt keeping certain key technologies would be important. The Evreux agree, and collectively we’ve been sneaking into museums, factories, and government offices and stealing the design and manufacturing documents for a number of key technologies. Some of them could be converted to run on their electrical systems with work, some of them are more or less specifically bound to magic energy to function. No matter that result, we’re saving them in case they manage to clean up their act and get the crystals working once more, so we can see it restored once society heals once more.

Normally, or rather, in the past, I suppose I would say ‘if’ society heals, but I’ve seen this happen enough times now that it’s pretty much inevitable. As long as the world isn’t wiped out completely, there will be a rebound sooner or later. More it’s a matter of what form development will take, and whether technology will go down this path again. It’s probably what Menos Cor and the people he worked for feared so much, if I had to guess. If they did not wipe out a society completely, then they could build up again to fight back later. As I look at the devastation on the frozen surface of Ildios, I just pray that we never have to see that enemy here again in the future.

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[regularspelling]

2016 Book Blitz - November (NaNoWriMo): The Inquisitor

Oh right, I forgot I needed to post this one too. 

Well, that doesn't look good now, does it? Let's take a look at it from NaNoWriMo's perspective.

Well there's the problem. Right there at the beginning of the month, there was hardly any progress for almost four days. That's because I actually had a migraine that lasted that enitre week, which made it really difficult to focus on trying to get any writing done, which made me fall behind for the entire month.

I actually spent a large amount of the month dealing with probably what was a cycle of rebound headaches/migraines, just piling up more and more from the painkillers and migraine abortives. In October and through November the Sumatriptan I had been previously perscribed for abortive that had seemed to be working just stopped, and I was perscribed a new one (SPOILERS: the new one doesn't seem to work either), as well as being put on a preventative as well, topiramate, which actually did seem to help once it did finally ramp up to the full dose. But I also let myself purge of all the painkillers at the same time, to try to break the cycle of the rebounds, and that probably in part has some impact on it as well. 

As we got to the latter half of the month, as you see, I was able to start to finally catch up to par with my actual goal rate from this year, but it took until literally the last day to make it to NaNoWriMo par itself, because of how much the beginning of the month had put me behind. So I barely scooted in at the last minute, but I made it. Not a failed NaNoWriMo yet. Would be a little embarassing to do so this year, too, consideirng I already met the NaNoWriMo challenge three separate months already this year. 

I did finish the book, too. On the first of November, in fact, I blitzed to the end. Ended up coming in at a little over 60k words, so shorter than the overall goal of 75k, but as I was writing the book I didn't really have enough story to write to 75k without making up unnecessary fluff. Actually ended up better than I was originally planning, which is the reason I blitzed to the ending on the last day, because I had an idea come to me as I was heading to bed on the 30th to expand the last chapter a bit, whcih I got up to jot down a note for, then as I was doing that I had another idea come with that that I realized would work well to tie everything together nicely, so I pushed forward the next day so I could write it while it was fresh. 

Four books done for the year. I meant to write this earlier in the month but forgot to, so I'll leave more for the full post-mortem on the year I'll put together tomorrow.

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[regularspelling]

Eliza’s Notes - 08: Age of Regression

Oddly enough, in a way the present day seems the most like Ildios to me. 

Not exactly like it, of course. We were more advanced than the way the world is right now through our more extensive use of magic. But in our day there were of course remnants of the Aughylian Empire around that nobody could use, ancient mystical technology that was simply collected and traded among the rich because it couldn't be activated. Whereas here it's everywhere, littered among ruined cities and thrown in gorges and rivers just to get it out of the way, but still otherwise just as mystical. And just as unusable. 

Society regressed once more. The wars of supplies led to much of the world's knowledge being destroyed in the crossfire, and as waves of people died out everything fell back to simple farming once more. So much lost, it hurts them to hear of it, as the eldest of the people alive tell stories to their youngest descendants, told to them by their eldest forefathers while they were at their youngest, of the way it was during the end days while the supplies were dwindling but the technology was still in use. 

I think what hurts this people more than anything else is that they can still see it all. They can see the road vehicles lying on the ruined streets, they can see the air vehicles lying in the fields where they fell from the sky and were too heavy to move. Scavengers search ruins of the cities for scrap metals and wood and tools that can be put to use in some way, and they all see all the wonderful conveniences of the past that can no longer be used anymore. For most of them, they don't even know how many of these things were even used, and their guesses can get interestingly wild. It hurts them that they know, they can see for themselves that the world used to be a better place, and there's nothing they can do about it. 

They live now in a simulacrum of what was lost, scrambling to be like how its told in the stories. Approximations of technologies of the past are used as best as they can. Animal drawn carts, both on free wheels and drawn along set path rails. Flame based lighting, either from candles or piped in gas where available. Where available, food is kept cool in boxes filled with ice, or in places where ice is not available in containers taking advantage of the evaporative cooling properties of water. To the people, though, it's seen as just an approximation, a reach toward the past that has been lost to them. Most don't realize that either they have either invented new technology to do the tasks without magic, or reinvented technology that already existed in the past that was then modified to work with magic when the crystals were created.  They could certainly do worse, as far as levels of technology are concerned. If only they would realize that they are looking toward the future, and not looking back to the past. 

Interestingly enough, the biggest advance has actually been the Evreux. With devastations to their underground systems, they had to go through and rebuild much of their infrastructure, giving them opportunity to overhaul and expand it. Using some of the technology we saved, combined with other technology they retained from the height of their civilization, they've created more advanced trains and other vehicles, increasing in speed and allowing for much faster travel between their settlements, as well as adding additional redundancy and alternate paths just in case something like before happens again. All of it based on more advanced technology and materials that require much less maintenance than before, allowing much easier use of the vast underground network.  

Along with expansion of their networks, they've also expanded their own underground towns and cities. With their belief that leaving the planet will lead them to disaster once again, they've adopted the idea since the time I first met them that expanding further into the underground will bring them more in tune with nature and the planet. They've developed new technologies to allow them to more easily grow food underground, which has allowed them to expand their population, and with it required them to build larger and more complex underground cities. Now complexes around key rail stations have expanded that can hold up to a thousand in them, or more as they expand further. Although, to their credit, they're not abandoning the surface, and have a policy of compulsory service among their people of living topside to grow and hunt for a time period so they better understand where they came from and where they are going.  

They've also taken the more advanced medical techniques and continued pushing them forward, again combined with their technology of the past. Implants and limb replacements have gone from clearly mechanical to indistinguishable from regular flesh, and requiring much less maintenance. Enhancements to supplement what has been lost by age are commonplace now. Age hasn't been kind to me myself, but thanks to several surgeries by highly skilled experts I've had knees and hips replaced, and enhancements to my musculature and nervous system to allow me the freedom of movement that I once had when I was much younger. I still look like an old woman, but in combat I would no longer move like one, something which would be sure to confuse anyone wishing to stand against me. 

As they've been expanding their technology, being the only human living among them has been... a little difficult. Their size compared to mine means some things are not well built for someone of my height, making things a little cramped for travel. Such as their rail cars, I have to more often sit on the ground to keep from bumping my head in the small trains traveling from city to the next. It's a good thing the trains are much faster than they used to be.

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