13K Steps

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

The natural trend of everything in life is a decline. Health, relationships, skills, happiness – it all needs effort. You’re either working to improve it or it goes sideways, south, or just vanishes.

I’ve been trying to improve my health by walking 10K steps daily. Last week I achieved 13K, using the colder weather and the willingness of my wife and the little kid to participate. At the end of Sunday, after meeting the goal of 13K for the week, I just tossed the Apple Watch and turned off my brain. Didn’t even read a book. Felt overwhelming and unpleasant.

Why does it feel like it is too much? An average of 13K means about 2h 10 min/day. The day is 24h. This leaves 21h 50min of inactivity. The human body was not made to be physically inactive for 22 hours per day. I have no answer yet. I’ll keep walking meanwhile.

True Magic by Roger Wilco

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

Roger Wilco is a Bulgarian fantasy gamebook writer who published exactly two books sometime around 1998. He was inspired by the more famous writer Michael Mindcrime, who he met on a tram. However, he started with the other book and ended with this one, and there’s no trace of other creations 26 years later. A Bulgarian version of Harper Lee.

I received a beautiful and well-preserved copy of True Macic by mail and it invited me to read it.

The book is short and readable, about 260 episodes. A junior mage and his anti-mage friend go after a magic book and a disk. The issue is that as it seems, there are lots of books of various colors, and the disks are likely CD-ROMs. They will find thousands. Judging by the book + CD-ROM-combo, I think the mission was to find one of those programming books from the 1990s with a CD glued inside.

The world is a post-apocalyptic fantasy where the current civilization has been transformed by a nuclear (or asteroid) holocaust. It remains unclear which one. The cities are in a mad-max-style chaos, and magicians roam around and wreak havoc. There are some safe spaces here and there, maintained by magic (and CD-ROMs).

I found a path to the end but the book likely keeps other mysteries hidden, including flying carpets. I might give it another chance.

A milestone for the little one

~ Veselin ~ 10 Comments

My younger kid made it to Cherni Vrah today and discovered the raspberries and the blueberries.

We did a relatively easy path (+510m, about 5.6km one way) but it took forever, given the obstacles. This is a major milestone for anyone living in Sofia. I think I reached it when I was around 7.

Jane Harper’s Force of Nature

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

When I write book reviews, I often mention the level of realism. Imagine a scale from 0 to 10. 0 is complete BS, things that can’t happen, heroes that can’t exist, and a path from start to finish that’s like a fairy tale. 10 is a boring autobiography by a boring person who doesn’t lie to put themselves in a good light. Realism is not required to have fun, a good story can be 0 or 10 on the scale.

Let’s rank some pop culture on the realism scale.

  • 0: Avengers: End Game – a complete disconnect with reality, written entirely to be like that. The characters are only visually human
  • 1: Star Wars Episodes 4-6 – a complete disconnect with reality but some of the characters make sense, like Jabba the Hutt. I’d put here most of the fantasy I read like Thraxas, Joe Abercrombie, Raymond Feist, the LOTR universe, Robin Hobb, Brandon Sanderson, Harry Potter
  • 2: Matthew Reilly, often featured here, writes about cars flying at a speed of 700km/h and crashing with no harm. Not far off from F1, although the characters are inhuman. I feel like he deserves the number 2 spot for himself.
  • 3: Stephen King plugs in plausible humans and outcomes in impossible fantasy settings. His work is incredible and diverse work but let’s average it to 3. 3 would be fantasy with a possible story or with possible characters but maybe not both
  • 4: The Foundation, Andy Weir – the classic sci-fi where the people look real and the events could eventually happen
  • 5: Song of Fire and Ice – lots of that happened in medieval times, or at least people imagined it did. Not the dragon eggs but the other stuff that fills 95% of the pages. Realistic fantasy, dystopia
  • 6: Alexandre Dumas. The Three Musketeers has a solid foundation in reality and the characters are likely based on real humans, perhaps from later periods
  • 7: Cinderella. That probably happened and was later decorated with some magic
  • 8: OMG ❤️, Stephanie Plum, Harry Bosch’s universe, Harlan Coben, the true crime stories
  • 9: Historical fiction, books like Wolf Hall that are as connected to the real events as they could be, autobiographies with some level of commerce
  • 10: Boring autobiographies

On that scale, Jane Harper enters the territory of boring autobiographies. There’s “No way” and “Oh, that’s why, yeah, damn”. Reading it is like reading the continuation of Cinderella, the happily ever after where the prince turned into a king, and the king was drunk and cheated.

So, I won’t tell you what the Force of Nature is about, but it’s sad and depressing in a beautiful way. Do not touch if you want an orthodox crime story.

4.5/5