My husband discovered Baldur’s Gate 3, and I think he has become one with his computer now.

The latest novel I finished was Sword of Kaigen. Published in 2019, this one is notable because it's one of the most successful indie-published fantasy novels ever. In addition to selling well and having top-tier reviews, it won the SPFBO award (a leading annual contest for indie fantasy books). The best review I saw for it described it as a "clumsy masterpiece" and I think that describes it well. Most of the book is 10/10, while other parts are like 4/10. The setting is similar to feudal Japan (called Kaigen), except warriors can wield elemental magic based on their lineage. In that sense, it's like the brutal adult version of Avatar the Last Airbender. The book is interesting in a few ways. It totally violates the common three-act structure. Literally no character has plot armor; anyone can die and stakes are real. The author ML Wang is a martial arts instructor, and so her fight scenes are quite good. One of the main characters is a mother in her 30s; she was a badass as a teenager but settled down to have kids over the past 15 years, but when her town is threatened, she has to dust off her old badassary. She's not the strongest around in terms of her ice magic, but she fights dirty and is totally brutal with unique abilities when her kids' lives are on the line. In that sense, it's all quite refreshing. A combination of serious emotional impact, good action, and avoiding common cliches or structures. The flaw mainly has to do with the context. The author's initial works took place in this world of hers, and Sword of Kaigen was written as a stand-alone prequel to them. So, some aspects tie into the rest of the world, and those are the weak points. In addition, the author has discontinued that world/series in basically a permanent hiatus, and so although the novel is kind of stand-alone, there are many overarching threats/problems that were built up that will likely never be addressed. In some sense that's realistic; this is a character-driven story about peoples' individual lives rather than some grand continent-spanning quest. Overall quite interesting; glad I read it. It starts slow, but the middle is absolutely insane.

A single human cell is more complex than any machine humanity knows how to build yet. Only our greatest processors are even getting close. The human body consists of trillions of these cells, specialized into tasks. A being of marvelous, monstrous complexity. And yet we forget where we put our phone.

Humanoid robots are interesting, but over the next decade, keep in mind the power requirements. The human brain is an *immensely* powerful computer and runs on like 20 watts. It is a breathtakingly efficient thing. Plus with a bit of water and (optionally) some food, a human body can operate for days. Getting humanoid robots to the point of being able to walk around and participate in our world with high levels of processing and long run times is going to be a hard and long-term engineering challenge. Harder than EV adoption. Robots in the real world are an order of magnitude more complex to get right than robots in a controlled industrial setting. I’m pretty bullish on smaller non-humanoid home robots though. Things like robodogs. They can plug themselves in to recharge whenever they are low on power, and can do all sorts of tasks that a well-trained dog could do, plus some other things (language recognition, a mounted arm that can grasp things better, etc). They’ll get exponentially better in the years ahead.

Rising political populism is an immune response to structural imbalances. Many people think this trade war just happened out of nowhere. There's some truth to that, meaning that Trump didn't have to engage in it in the way he did. But you have to look back several steps to get a bigger picture. The way the dollar reserve currency system is structured, the world needs an ever-growing number of dollars, and the US supplies those dollars via a permanent trade deficit. Those two aspects are joined at the hip. This hollows out the US industrial base, and hurts some regions (e.g. the Midwest) and helps others (e.g. NYC and DC). Eventually those cumulative imbalances get so big, combined with other imbalances as well, that political realignments shift in generationally important ways. The "blue wall", referring to the northern part of the Midwest that's at the center of the rust belt and historically voted Democrat, has shifted Republican or otherwise become more mixed. The trade deficit and other imbalances have become front and center. Establishment-type folks are going to keep being blindsided by this type of thing as long as the imbalances persist. They're going to keep pointing to one-time phenomenon, like one specific election, or one specific person, but really it's the underlying imbalance that's at the heart of it.

It seems we like the coin again.

One of the challenges of fiction is to balance pacing between action and downtime. My draft sci fi novel is relatively fast-paced, but doesn't push it to the limit as some of those non-stop action stories do. There are moments where characters have more "slice of life" days, or moments of emotion or contemplation, etc. Periods for the characters and reader to catch their breath before something big happens. However, one thing I try to do is make it so that each of those slower moments serves a *double purpose*. When reading those chapters, the reader's initial takeaway is that it was for character building and so forth, and is potentially skippable. But then later in the novel, some character aspect or worldbuilding aspect revealed in each of those chapters ends up being more important than they realized at the time. Like playing chess against someone and a few of their moves seem random or unneeded, but then it comes together into a surprise checkmate where each move was indeed deliberate to help set it up. That's the goal, anyway. One of the first-wave beta readers of my sci fi manuscript noticed this, and it was one of my favorite pieces of feedback so far. He felt some of the slower moments could be trimmed in the moment and wrote those moments down, but by the end was basically like, "nevermind, I see now, keep literally all of those."

After driving my Hyundai for 16 years, it’s finally starting to fail. So I’m going to join the rich life now… and get a Toyota. Here’s to the next 16.

What are the main pros and cons between Nostr and Pubky under the hood?

The biggest “productivity hack” I have is just not watching television. What little I watch is very intentional. In the second half of 2024, I watched Blue Eye Samurai (8 episodes) and Arcane (18 episodes). In 2025 I watched the first season of Invincible (8 episodes). Usually during lunch, on my computer. One thing I realized is that since coming back from Egypt three months ago, I didn’t turn on any of our televisions. They were off for the three months I was in Egypt as well. So when my husband came back he’s like “…why the hell are all the televisions messed up, all apps logged out of, remotes basically dead?” Last night we got one of the televisions working and watched Deadpool and Wolverine, lol.

My husband is flying back to the U.S. today after having been stuck in Egypt managing a big construction project for a while. He hates long flights, so to amp himself up he randomly decided to stop in Dublin for two days. Just because he hadn’t been there before. So he just went there by himself for no particular reason, stayed in a literal castle hotel, ate steak, drank beer, spent hours walking around seeing all sorts of delightful churches and parks and homes, and then left.

Went shopping at Target today and took a moment to look at the book section. The adult fiction section was like 85% romance (including romantasy), 14% thriller, and then Wind and Truth.

While I have nothing against short fiction, the reason I’m not drawn to it is that I want to get to know the characters. That takes time. My sweet spot tends to be a long stand-alone novel or a duology/trilogy. When you go longer than that, into some epic series, I’m skeptical. By default I view it as someone writing for a career rather than to tell their optimal story, with *very* limited exceptions.