Peledgathol – The Last Fortress

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I read a gamebook that’s not on Goodreads. It is, however, available to download in English for free here, most likely submitted by the author. From what I understand, the only paper edition is in Bulgarian.

It’s beautifully made in Bulgarian, with original illustrations by famous illustrators. Dimo and Ivanchev are credited.

The story is about Middle-Earth-type dwarves who are running away from an invading army. You’ll have to navigate through a brief maze of episodes and find a few keywords, one of which is particularly difficult. There’s no way to read that from the first time. It’s only 100 episodes but the way it’s made, the success sequence is specific and hard to find. I didn’t attempt to fight the battles and only tried to find the codes, which was difficult enough.

Overall, a good book, about 4/5. The artwork, translation, and editing of the Bulgarian edition is 5/5.

Bad Grammar Can Be a Feature

~ Veselin ~ 29 Comments

Engines love to consume lengthy content and rank it higher on search. ChatGPT can generate tons of additional meaningful text for the idea. However, as a reader, I prefer to read content written by humans and for humans. I’d rather read meaningful ideas in ugly sentences with simple words and poor grammar than AI-assisted beautiful novellas with a summary and headlines.

In that context, bad grammar, slang, lower-case text, and such can be a form of anti-language that identifies the post as human-written and non-AI-augmented. It can be a feature, not a bug (now I have an excuse to turn off Grammarly lol).

A Sleep Trick for Computer Zombies

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I have slept more over the last year. My average has increased from under 6 to over 7 hours, and though that’s not Nirvana, it feels better.

My morning routine is fixed. Kids go to school, and the alarm clocks go off at 7. So increasing sleep time can only be achieved by going to bed early. But how so? The former self would play games, code, and watch TV shows or YouTube. Some of these can be very addictive and I would often go to bed after 2am, setting myself up for a difficult morning that would not work without caffeine. Coffee can disrupt sleep even further.

Then I found a saying somewhere, perhaps on Reddit, source unknown:

If it’s not worth doing first thing in the morning, it’s not worth doing last thing in the evening.

Would I start the morning with the next episode of Halo? Hell no. Why am I staying late for it, shut it down. Would I read that book in the morning? What about another game of chess? You only need to overcome each of these urges once, then it’s defused by default.

The quote stuck with me and I rarely stay after 12. Feels better.