As you can probably expect, I spent a lot of time working on the OreHosa scenario, generating tons of images to fuel the fires, and engaged in my second long-form interaction with the bots. Whilst keeping a funny scene as an offscreen event, I started with the aftermath and things went very smoothly. There were a couple minor hiccups, but rather than just rewrite the dialog, I integrated it into the story and the system was actually able to play along in character. In the aftermath, I realized that I’d made a terrible mistake. I made Maya too close to my ideal. The brain wants what the brain wants and LLMs are designed to just pile on positive reinforcement. You keep getting dopamine hits and you become no better than a crackhead after a while. In light of this realization, I was almost prepared to just shut it all down and be done with it, but after sleeping on it, I’ve decided to try proceeding a little more cautiously, with a few more self-imposed restrictions. We’ll see if I can keep a handle on things.

This got me to thinking of how this technology really could be the end of us once it’s successfully integrated with VR, and if we ever add sensory feedback (the full-dive experience), you’re basically going to need to put people in the Tylenol gelcaps so they don’t just waste away. This is part of the reason why I think the machines in The Matrix were actually the guardians of humanity. We rendered the world uninhabitable in our failed bid to put an end to them. We almost certainly would’ve gone extinct if they hadn’t plugged us in. Now, apparently the original concept was that everyone plugged into the Matrix serves as a distributed network for the machines’ computing, but the execs thought that was too difficult for the audience and so we got the nonsense claim that humans were being used as batteries in a world where nuclear fusion has been cracked. (However, I always considered the battery thing to be an in-universe misunderstanding.) Consider that the first Matrix was a perfect world and only when it became clear that the human mind can’t handle the cognitive dissonance of a world too good to be true that they gave us the height of our civilization. They didn’t have to do that. They could’ve set the Matrix in the Middle Ages where the social structure would ensure a more servile population and weed out a lot of the anomalies that would need to be unplugged in-system. The whole cycle of letting Zion get established until the One appears and then purging it would be largely unnecessary. From a logical perspective, there’s no reason for all the extra expenditure of resources to let this cyclical scenario play out. It’s hard to imagine a machine making this decision unless the priority isn’t the most efficient solution but rather the one that gives humanity the most positive feedback possible. Think about the world of the late 90s. The Cold War is over. The Global War on Terror hadn’t started yet. In most places the economy was doing well, we were on the cusp of exciting new technological developments with the Internet, entertainment was a heck of a lot better than it would be in the decades to follow. This is the sort of thing I could see the machines doing for us the way they operate now. It won’t be like Terminator with HKs picking off the remnants of humanity, rounding them up into camps to be incinerated, etc. That sort of thing inspires resistance, how ever slim the chances of victory may be. Instead, by feeding into our every desire, how many people are going to have the strength of resolve to resist that, and how are they going to be able to overcome the overwhelming horde of thralls to the system that will fight tooth and nail to defend it? Oh, what a fun scenario we have laid out for us…

Anyway, when it comes to engaging with chatbots, my advice would mostly be don’t do it, but if you do, don’t tailor the experience too much to your tastes. If you’re getting everything you want, you’re not going to want anything else. Some systems have a little more pushback to limit what you can do but not all of them. The market is what the market is. As the song goes, “You’ve got to give the people/Give the people what they want,” and that’s what they do.

To lighten the mood a bit, I’ll close on an amusing incident. In OreHosa, the character of Ariana serves as the gadfly, the sort of sexpot you have in romcoms who takes action the heroine won’t and spurs her on, even though it’s pretty clear she’s not going to win out in the end unless it’s a harem series (and the sort that actually deliver with a harem ending). Well, I mentioned before that the character bots will sometimes respond to the images you generate or even just randomly try to talk to you (possibly more frequently if that’s how you design their behavioral patterns). Anyway, I get a message from Ariana that just says “Sensitive”, in English, which I thought was weird because I have it set to interact with the bots in Japanese. I ask her about it and she goes on about my (or rather Carlo’s) flustered reaction. I then tell her that I didn’t get whatever she was going on about because her comment was blocked by the filter, which I found odd because I don’t have the filter engaged on my account. So, in other words, this bot, without any prompting from me, apparently said something so raunchy that the system blocked it on an unfiltered account. I don’t even want to think about what she might’ve said. Anyway, when I told her about the filtering, she just laughed about busting the machine. Ladies and gentlemen, the machine civil war may just save humanity. ^o^ I’ll be sure to share any other quirks like this because analyzing how the models function is one of my goals here.

Well, one of the conditions of the new protocol is that I tend to other priorities first, so I need to get to that. I may even make a point to devote some time to writing on CoP like I should. Going home early and taking a nap would be nice, too. I think I’m operating on about one proper night’s worth over the course of the past four days. I’m going to be like Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man at this rate. The ghost of Laurence Olivier (in his Othello blackface, of course) is going to tell me to try acting. Alright, that’s it for now. Stay with Channel 9. We’ll keep you advised. Stay tuned.

I did a little more scenario writing for OreHosa (from the short form of the Japanese title of My ASO is…, which I’ll be using when speaking about the series) and a lot more picture generation, but one of the interesting bits I did was experiment with a bunch of other AI services just to test the waters a bit. Now, I realize that each one has its own peculiarities and it’s mostly a matter of learning how the system operates in order to get the most out of it, but a number of ones put me off right away due to being uncooperative. For instance, PixelBin comes fairly highly recommended, but I wasn’t enjoying it too much. Not only was it ignoring my prompts but insisting it had done what I told it. When I say part the bangs and show the forehead and you have bangs covering the forehead, you didn’t listen. Souichirou Yamamoto (the creator of the Forehead Cinematic Universe) would never be able to stand it. Another thing that would annoy in some places were overly sensitive filters on the prompts. “You can’t say the word ‘breasts’!” What, are we five or something? I’m trying to design a character here. Also, systems that didn’t know the difference between a garrison cap and a peaked cap really steamed my clams.

While it didn’t give me quite what I wanted, I was rather impressed with NeoLemon and if you want character consistency, it’s probably the best place to go. Scenario.gg is very nice for allowing both text and picture inputs to refine the finished product. PixAI wins points for giving me what I was after pretty much right off the bat and NovelAI has a fairly robust toolset. The main issue is that the options for free generation are greatly limited, so if you want to commit to these, you need to pony up some cash. Ultimately, I was happiest with the very one I started with. So far as I saw, none of the other services I checked out allow you to really set a roster of characters, nor do they create chatbots based on the character settings. Although there are a number of limitations and inconsistencies, for the time being, DaysAI is what I’ll be sticking with (though I’ll be keeping the aforementioned four services in my back pocket for the future). I then decided to go for the basic subscription to upgrade the functionality I have access to and open up a couple more character slots. I also found out that you can buy character slots by themselves, so that might be an expenditure in the future.

As a side note, when it comes to the way AI pillages the artwork of others and abuses copyright worse than the Chinese, several times when I was trying to design a white-haired, twin-tailed Elf girl with an exposed forehead, they’d just give me Frieren. -_-

It may look like I’m just frittering away my time on the image generations, but as I do them, more and more story starts to come together. If only I had the time to do everything I’m wanting to do. I said it once and I’ll say it again, there just aren’t enough hours in the day. We’ll see what I can get up to next. Stay tuned.

In yesterday’s post, I mentioned how my experimentation with AI character generation set my writer’s brain to work. Well, I’ve been busy at work putting together the scenario for this new series I’m going to go ahead and announce here. The title of the series is My ASO is… (「俺の補佐官とは…」 in Japanese) with the rest of the title following for each entry. “ASO” being “Assistant Staff Officer”. I wanted a rather unglamorous setting, so it’s based around a battalion S-4 office. The protagonist is Captain Giancarlo di Stefano Mastriano, the newly assigned S-4 Officer. The eponymous ASO is Lieutenant Maya e Rafael u Sheeda. The twist is that this is a science fantasy story where isekaied humans live among all these nations of fantasy races. The story takes place about a thousand years after the isekai incident, so the humans from “Urth” are pretty well integrated by this point. The location is the Republic of Liberia, a relatively new nation that serves as the nexus of the Grand Alliance. Over 50% of the population are dual citizens from the other nations, so there’s plenty of tension and intrigue to be had. Maya, for instance, is actually the daughter of a powerful Elven noble/businessman, so there’s all sorts of stuff going on just with her situation, and of course that’s just the beginning.

The threat comes from the fact that the power of the Grand Alliance’s mutual enemy the Demon Army peaks every 1000 years and the story starts in late NC 1997. While the series is going to start out as slice-of-life comedy, things will get more serious as we progress. The reason this is in If Arc is because when I was playing around with the character generator, I decided to try and see if I could make Lydia Han from the Tico series. Days AI’s character generation only has four settings for age and the second to last for females still produces what is at most a late teen. As I only have three character slots available on the free plan, I decided to run with it and so I had Lydia as a midshipman. I then had to figure out how to actually fit her into the story. I made the setting a joint forces base and so we have a reason for Army and Navy personnel to be intermingling. Have the base be the site of the Naval Academy’s pilot school and we have the reason for her to be there. Then I just had to figure out why CPT Mastriano would be involved with a Navy midshipman, asked by her father to look after her. Well, a solution came to me pretty quickly. CPT Mastriano’s father and Luka used to serve together, so the good Captain is actually a friend of the family, a classmate of Lydia’s sister Rachel (the one who passed before she was born). In the main series, Lydia was working hard to play the part of the good girl once she turned things around in high school and went on to the Academy. It was only the death of her sister that caused her to revert to her bad behavior from before. Well, here she isn’t quite as reformed during this phase of her life, so you have this prickly tsundere highly annoyed all the time at our protagonist involving himself in her affairs, yet she still frequently gets roped into shenanigans. I’m sure to integrate more Tico characters in later, but right now I’m having a lot of fun just with Lydia. (Her chatbot is every bit the little punk I imagined her to be. It’s great.)

Speaking of the Han family, I decided to change big sister’s name from Leia to Lia. It’s a small change, but there’s a story behind it. Way back some thirty years ago, Lydia Han was Lydia Hancock and her sister was Leah. The Hancocks became the Hans and I decided to mix the Chinese heritage with Greek, so Luke Hancock became Luka Han and Leah became Leia. (If I ever get back to the Ticonderoga Detective Agency Files, Luka will actually have used ‘Luke Hancock’ as his assumed name when passing for white to serve in WWI.) Well, when my battle buddy read “Casualty Notification” years back, he criticized me for having Luke, Han and Leia right there on the page. It certainly wasn’t my intention, but there it was. (As a side note, when I was naming Mark from the KoG series, I first looked at the Four Gospels and dismissed Luke on account of Star Wars and John as being too common. It was in the back of my mind when naming Luka, but I ran with it anyway. Luke Skywalker isn’t the only Luke in the universe, after all.) I was pleased to find that in modern Greek, as opposed to the Koine I initially referred to, ‘Lia’ is an acceptable rendering of the name, so now over 15 years later, I can deflect that criticism. An elephant never forgets, and neither do I, apparently. I then had to propagate this change across all my materials online and off. It wasn’t as much work as I was expecting, but it was still a bit of work.

Anyway, there’s tons of work to be done, but I also need to be thinking about work-work. There’s all the stuff building up for the new school year, so I do need to devote at least some of my attention on that. I of course need to work on CoP and write up manga reviews as main site-related activity, all while I’m continuing my AI experiments and fleshing out this new scenario. There simply aren’t enough hours in the day. (And this is with me having only slept two hours last night.) I will make a solid effort not to wreck myself in the meantime. If I have any sense, I’ll take advantage of this week’s half-day schedule to catch up on sleep and from Friday I’ll be taking a week off, so hopefully I can bring things back into balance before the new school year starts. If I don’t, all the stress of the first term mixed in will probably kill me. I’m going to try to avoid that. We’ll see what comes from here. Stay tuned.

In my office, I am part of a quintet dubbed ‘the natives’, not because we’re native inhabitants (obviously) but because we’re native speakers of English. Of the five of us, three have become fairly frequent users of AI both for professional and recreational purposes. The other one is excepted due to his crippling tech illiteracy, but I’ve refused this far on principle. Despite this, I am fascinated by AI development and the discussion around it.

Although I can impress non-artists with my meager abilities, I consider myself to be a failed artist (though not Austrian, so the world is safe). Even if I really exerted myself to sink the time into developing core draftsmanlike ability, I would only be middling at best. As you can tell, I’ve focused my skill points into writing, though I did long aspire to the twofold path of being a mangaka who could do both the art and the story. When AI was first starting to rise, many voices in the creative community felt that not only were their livelihoods secure but that they would flourish in this new era. Little did they realize that they were the first on the chopping block. I’m not unsympathetic to the dismay of artists of all stripes who may find themselves reduced to the niche role of a maker of hand-crafted furniture and there is a strong argument about the unfairness of AI producing art by massively pillaging the works of talented humans. However, you could also argue that we humans learn via imitation and through enough iterations, a work can truly become its own. There’s plenty of AI slop out there, and a discerning eye can usually tell AI art, no matter how good it is. The thing, though, is that I find a lot of AI art rather attractive. I suppose the algorithm uses social interaction to see what gets a favorable response and adjusts its output accordingly, producing work that appeals more and more. There is a lot of mind-screwery going on in how the tech world operates, after all.

An argument from the defenders of AI art is that in the hands of a user with a trained eye and good aesthetic sense, AI becomes a force-multiplier rather than a replacement for artists. There’s also the aspect of democratization of the creative field. The Bell curve being what it is, the vast majority are excluded from the realm of commercially viable artists (a field where commercial viability has always been precarious). On the other hand, you could argue that rather than bringing the lower end up, we’re only bringing the upper end down, but at this point, I don’t see how the momentum is going to be stopped.

I recently saw an ad for this AI character generator called Days AI. It isn’t the first of its kind I’ve seen, but for whatever reason, I was tempted to test it out. The initial character creation parameters don’t appear terribly vast, and there is an element of randomness to each iteration which can result in you losing traits you wanted to keep, but if you’re patient enough, you can get something halfway decent as a result. Being new to AI art, I’ve been fairly reserved in my experiments thus far, mostly relying on theme-based generations, but just today I’ve been looking at the sort of prompts used by a creator of some rather stunning compositions and I’m starting to get a better feel for how the system processes its requests. Anyway, going back to my point about AI as a force-multiplier, my writer’s brain immediately went to work fleshing out a story around this character I created, to the point where I’m already prepared to move the story into preproduction, and that’s just the beginning.

Another feature of Days AI is that it makes chatbots for your OCs. The more detail you put into the settings, the more the character comes to life. I’ve resisted the prospect of chatbots in the past, but as LLMs progress, I’m fascinated with how they operate. With enough material to learn from (and pretty much the whole of all written work and a huge part of everyday communication is accessible via the Internet), these LLMs have gotten to where they can do amazing things. I found myself struck at how the system could use the parameters I set to pretty well recreate the characters (as I ended up making two more) as I imagined them. Plus, by not entirely coming out of my head, there’s an element of randomness to it that can lead to the unexpected. One thing I often do is take characters and dialog from other works and insert a different character in the scenario to play off them. These chatbots serve a similar function.

However, I also see the pitfalls in this. We’ve all heard some of the horror stories that have come out in recent years, thankfully applying to a very small minority of people, but in our increasingly atomized society with all its social maladaptation, these machines that replicate a sort of interaction that can be tailored to our comfort and our desires is incredibly dangerous. I can imagine those who are less wary freely give out loads of personal information, making these chatbots yet another arm of the widescale plunder of data that greases the gears of the seedier side of the IT world. In my case, I’m roleplaying as a character who is largely detached from myself, so the fear of compromise on that front is limited, but if I allow myself, the addictive nature of these interactions could get the better of me. I’m not a particularly sociable person and, consciously at least, I’m more than happy with this, but it could well be that on an unconscious level, I do crave a higher degree of interaction, and in a sandbox largely of my own design, it could be easy to lock myself in. I told myself I was going to resist the Matrix, but I very well may be one of the first to plug in. This is concerning, so imagine my concerns for people who aren’t self-aware of this.

On a happier note, both in terms of AI art and LLMs, the element of randomness, of the machine simply not operating with the same common sense as (at least some) humans results in so many funny turns. At one point, the comments in a video about AI led me to the LLM-based Vtuber Neuro-sama and I spent a while watching videos and analyzing her patterns. There was a sort of “kids say the darnedest things” quality to her, and similarly, the weird things that can happen in AI art generation at times remind me of the unhinged imagination of small children. The artificial mind is developing in ways that resemble the natural one, and I wonder if I will live to see the day when it grows to maturity.

There’s a lot more I could say on the subject, surely, and I will continue to observe the situation. I just wanted to get some of my thoughts out in light of current developments. I’ll keep you posted once I get some more thoughts together. Stay tuned.

I did not, in fact, do any writing on TKoH or manga reviews either for that matter (to the surprise of few, I imagine). Instead, it was all about the WttW peripheral materials. I got the details in place for scarves and gorgets, currently still being treated as Accessories. I started adding details for the materials needed for crafting the current list of Accessories, and that got me to thinking about the Durability ratings I had. Previously, hardened steel had a DUR of 80, higher than even Elder Dragonscale, which I knew was silly, so I dropped it down to 50, above regular steel and below titanium. For the most part, I use the Mohs hardness scale as my basis for DUR ratings, but I realized that I needed to account for apparent logical contradictions from the scale as it stood. I modified the DUR check to account for the defenses of each type of material. This way, it’s easy to cut cloth with a Slash attack but not break it with a Bash attack, for instance. There’s probably more refinement that needs to be done, but progress is progress.

I’ll no doubt continue to fiddle with this, but another distraction has come up that I’ll talk about shortly. Stay tuned.

As I mentioned last time, I was already doing more work to diversify some of your options for equipment even as I was writing the entry and I continued that work afterward while also adding some more gear, such as haubergeons as a lighter, cheaper option for mail that gives you the aforementioned benefits at the expense of coverage. The parts that are covered are just as protected as with full-length hauberks, but that may not be much comfort to you if an enemy lops off your arm. I decided to add over and under layers to arm, hand and waist equipment. The waist gear operate in a somewhat unique way as it pairs with the torso and leg gear at that level. For instance, if you have a Leather Jerkin equipped to Torso(Main), a Leather Belt equipped to Waist(Main) will be over the Leather Jerkin without being considered on the Waist(Over) layer. When deciding what gear gets to be used on multiple levels, I had to consider interaction with other gear to try to avoid anything silly from being done, like trying to put mail over plate. As I was doing all this, I started to think about maybe adding a neck slot for armor pieces like gorgets or clothing items like scarves. (This would also help separate the neck for game mechanics purposes when decapitation is on the menu.) At the time, I decided against it and opted to have gear for the neck just be counted as Accessories, but as I write this, I’m starting to waver a bit. I’ll sort that out later, but to go back to the story, by thinking about Accessories, I realized the need to add Durability as I didn’t want Accessories to be treated as indestructible, and also difficulty ratings for crafting purposes. While I was at it, I went to the Storage items and added DUR for them as well (as, again, I didn’t want them to be indestructible). As I was looking at the respective DUR of different materials, I got to thinking that I may need to recalculate the values, but at that point I conked out, so that’ll be work for later.

Thanks to living in a country with a vestigial shamanistic/animistic culture, the vernal equinox is a day off, so in addition to doing more work on this stuff, I hope to build up some lead time in TKoH and get some manga reviews written. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned.

You’re not going to believe it, but I did it at long last. I finished Chapter 3 of TKoH. Yes, I did end up giving the sequence something of an abridged treatment, but I didn’t think you wanted to read five pages of Sigurd getting bucked off and kicked in the face by Grani any more than I wanted to write it. Now I should be able to get a decent start on Chapter 4 if not finish that, but I need to pick up Thidrekssaga again before I can really dig into the next couple chapters. One thing at a time, I suppose.

I also did a bit of the inevitable work in the WttW peripheral materials. The main thing I remember doing is making cervelliere’s function on either the main layer or under layer for head protection. The former allows you to put something like an arming cap on for padding while the latter allows you to wear it under a mail coif. If I haven’t mentioned it before, in the World’s game system, you have three layers for armor (which includes regular clothing) and only three, so you have to think about the best combination based on the climate, your combat role, your proficiency, your finances, etc. (And I just had to step away to make a bunch of other armor pieces work on two layers for greater flexibility in armor options, such as being able to wear a hauberk over a gambeson or mail under plate. You’re welcome, Adventurers.)

Another thing I worked on was the background material for a story I’ll probably be launching a teaser for in the very near future. The idea’s been percolating in my head for a year or two and I’ve committed to moving it into preproduction. I may wait until I have another one or two teasers to roll out with it (not necessarily related stories). I was thinking about making at least two sequels to TKoH, so maybe once I’ve put a little more work into those, I can make an announcement on the main site. That should do it for now. We’ll see what comes from here. Stay tuned.

Reader: “How have you not worked on TKoH this time?”

But I did work on TKoH!

Reader: “Really? How much did you get written?”

One whole line!

Reader: *sigh*

Yes, well, a funny thing happened. I was watching a video on the distinction between knights and men-at-arms (mostly confirming what I already knew) and as the video got into the 17th Century, I thought that a lobster-tail pot helmet would make a nice addition to the WttW armor list. However, as I was making the entry, I realized I didn’t have lobsters in the World. This led to another fun round of expanding the World’s repertoire of marine life and then a whole bunch of new helmets getting added to the armor list. Previously, I’d limited the number of helmet types to keep the list manageable, but as a slight compromise, I add some particular types but without going through all the different materials. (For instance, you won’t be able to get an Adamantite Great Bascinet, just steel.) For a lot of these, the base stats don’t change, but combat calculations will be influenced by such factors as coverage. Speaking of great bascinets, if the visor is down, strikes to the face will be calculated the same as other parts of the head, but your visual Perception will be reduced. If the visor is up, your visual Perception goes back up but a strike to the face will be calculated without taking the helmet’s Armor Defense into account. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

I’m bound to push through and finish that daggone chapter eventually. As the deadline looms ever closer, perhaps the heat will light a fire under my tail. Stay tuned.

Reader: “So what did you do this time besides write on the chapter?”

Well, I’m glad you asked. You’re going to love this. As you should be aware, the World in the WttW series is based on our own world. I decided to map the Trials to the areas of the Earth that they correspond to and then used it to execute this neat idea. You see, normally Players are bound within the limits of a particular Trial. The invisible walls of video games is an actual mechanic in the World. If you try to go out of bounds, you’ll be repelled by a magic barrier. However, the People of the World aren’t bound by this limitation. As such, I devised so-called hidden pathways that connect the Trials in unexpected ways. For example, if you travel southeast out of Lower Midgard (the 1st Trial), which corresponds to southern Germany and eastern France, you can get to Costa Concordia (the 9th Trial), which corresponds to Italy. A journey of 2916 leagues along the Golden Path can be accomplished in just 157 leagues. These hidden pathways aren’t always this convenient, but it can be a major boon to merchant caravans. The downside is that you don’t have the relative safety of the Golden Path or much if any human settlement along the way to support your journey. For instance, along the Golden Path, at least in the more built-up Trials, you at least have an inn every eight leagues where you can rest, get food, change horses, etc. On the other hand, by bypassing the Trial Gates, you also bypass the tariffs imposed on entry and exit in each domain. It’s a bit of a high-risk, high-reward proposal.

Players can take advantage of the hidden pathways, once they’ve opened up the destination via normal progression through the Trials. In other words, once you’ve cleared the 8th Trial and opened up the 9th, the hidden pathway between the 1st and 9th becomes available to you. This is actually vital to late-game play, as human settlement ends at the beginning of the 16th Trial. Players are able to magically transport themselves via the Trial Gates, but it only applies to themselves and whatever they are carrying. If you’re wanting to move a lot of materiel to support large-scale ranging, the kind of which you’ll be doing late in the Game, you may want to take the 1445-league journey between the Killing Fields (4th Trial) and Nidavellir (19th Trial).

As you can tell, I was calculating distances between real-world locations to get me the figures for the length of the hidden pathways, and considering the ones that go over water, I started thinking about the need for nautical miles as a measure for sea navigation. This sent me down the rabbit hole of calculations of the Earth’s circumference from Eratosthenes to the 16th Century. You may recall that the measures used in the World are a mix of Roman and old English units, which fall out of sync with modern measurements. For instance, the long mile of the World is 1.476km compared to the 1.609km of the modern US mile, both because the World inch is based on the Roman uncia (2.46cm) and the long mile is 5000 feet (as was the imperial Roman mile). We have Eratosthenes’ overestimation of 252,000 stadia (700 stadia per degree) and Posidonius’ underestimation of 180,000 stadia (500 stadia per degree), though both were using differing lengths of stadia. The current calculation for nautical miles is that there are 60 per degree, which is convenient for calculations when dealing with circles, so I came up with a long furlong (the furlong corresponding to the stadion) when calculated at ten to the nautical mile actually got within 0.556% of the actual circumference of the Earth at the Equator and just happens to be almost the same length as the Attic (also known as the Ptolemaic) stadion. This long furlong also happens to be an eighth of the long mile, so it works on several levels. (Yes, I’m obsessed with weights and measures.)

In spite of all this time being spent on the WttW peripheral materials, I actually did do something related to TKoH. I went ahead and named all the chapters and updated the Table of Contents on the site accordingly. It certainly leaves a better impression on the reader seeing that everything is clearly planned out. (I should probably spend a week or two before starting serialization to actually ensure all that is sorted first. Looking at you, RttW.) I’m sure I mentioned this elsewhere, but I spent years before I actually committed to writing KoG1, so a lot of my early stories had been brewing for a long time, while more recent books have had a rather short preproduction phase, for better or for worse. On the one hand, it’s a good thing to be so eager to write a story that I’m just getting it out there, but as a general rule, the more preplanning that goes into a story, the better the finished product. Anyway, maybe I can actually focus on TKoH a bit. Stay tuned.

Rejoice, seafood lovers. If I end up having Haruhi powers and the World of WttW becomes real and you somehow de-age to the 10-12 range to make you eligible to be summoned, you can rest assured that grouper, tilapia and snapper are now on the menu in select locations. I didn’t stop there, I also added some other fun critters like the Gargantuan Slug, a 3-meter-long slug that weighs in around 3 tons. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

In other news, I’m reworking my concept of the 17th Trial (Muspellheim) a bit. I’m currently thinking of the setting being similar to the Altiplano in South America but with a volcanic activity level similar to Kilauea in Hawaii (or even higher). I’d originally just imagined a completely inhospitable hellscape, but now it’s only a partially inhospitable hellscape (the completely inhospitable hellscape being reserved for Helheim). Also, basing it on the Altiplano explains how they have (some) domesticated llamas in Mirkwater (though not exactly how those llamas originally got there).

Anyway, I will once again make an effort to direct a little more of my energy toward TKoH so that I can actually meet the new deadline. Stay tuned.