Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments
Daily writing prompt
Share a story about the furthest you’ve ever traveled from home.
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By distance, it has to be Kauai. It was a company meetup, one of the most epic I’ve attended. 12.9K km, 24+ hours of travel one-way. Our lead wanted to organize the best meetup ever and did one that’s very difficult to beat. It remained a good lifetime memory.

The sign says that if you swim, you'll be carried away by the currents and there will be nobody to help.

Imagine you have a group of 20 to gather together for a week from all over the world. Where would you go? Turns out that if you optimize for travel time, travel cost, opportunity cost, hotel, food, and convenience, you’ll get a very small list of cities next to the biggest airports on the planet. The group of 20 is likely skewed one way or another. Have more Americans? The top 10 choices will be continental USA or Canada, you end up visiting Montreal or Portland every year. Have more people from the EU? Lisbon, Barcelona, Amsterdam. You’ve got to have some Australians in the group to make Kauai even remotely possible 🙂

However, if we don’t count physical distance but the time and effort it takes to come back home, it has to be the military service.

AI and Blaze

~ Veselin ~ 14 Comments

The AI ad generator outperformed me in Blaze.

Blaze is WordPress.com’s internal ad system (Tools > Advertising). I decided to give it a try and ran 2 campaigns. The first was for a random Book post with an AI generated ad, and the second was for one of my best long reads with a hand-crafted ad copy.

The AI-generated one had a $0.3 CPC compared to $0.56 for my post. I also got fewer impressions.

The CPC that I achieved was okay but my blog is not a business, and doesn’t deserve it yet.

You Are Deadpool

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

An adventure gamebook in the shape of a comic book. Best of both worlds 🙂 It has 5 sub-stories, each with 100-ish episodes.

September starts strong with a 5/5 book that I would not dare to review. It’s Deadpool. I hate superheroes but Deadpool hates them too, so I think it’s fine.

The August Pile of Books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I read 9 books in August. Pretty happy with that achievement, although two of these were very short.

Best books

  • The Dry by Jane Harper, and the series about Aaron Falk. It’s a quiet mystery — cozy and depressing — that doesn’t fit the usual mold. I enjoy books with a lyrical style, where the story is secondary to the writing itself. Jonathan Moore writes like that.
  • The Goblins Return by Lubomir Nikolov. It’s a fun and refreshing gamebook that touched my childhood memories. The book’s content aged well, though the pages were yellow and brittle.

Worst books

  • Six of Crows – a popular young adult novel where teenagers act like elderly gang members. There’s a 17-year-old leader with a cane who is too mature to have a girlfriend. Nobody has acne or other problems appropriate for their age. The storytelling was nice and smooth but the details felt dubious. I think the good execution compensates for the bad details and gave it 4/5.
  • Orconomics – some people walk around in a fantasy world and wait for the main character to awaken as The Red Beard. I’m actually looking forward to the continuation. The Red Beard was kind of cool and the absurd world can be a feature.