Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
My computer took a hit. I spilled a glass of sparkling water over the keyboard. It’s now drying. I can’t work and the OCD is strong. I’ve been glued to that thing for far too long.
At least I can still blog, thanks to the Jetpack app.
Ps. Apparently there’s a strong chance that the computer will stop working due to corrosion in the next days. There’s also a strong chance it will keep working because I spilled water and I turned it upside down quickly. Wish me luck.
I had no idea that the tech park has a supercomputer. I wonder what they do with it. You can do miracles with a resource like that. Mine bitcoin 😉
Also something with AI.
Bansko is changing.
It used to be a small town with an old city. Then the ski zone came with thousands of new hotels, growing faster than the infrastructure. It had lots of people in the winter but was a muddy ghost town in the summer. Now the central area is expanding with paved walking streets that make it a summer resort as well.
The digital nomads and hipsters have found it. It has multiple co-working spaces. An abandoned hotel turned to a co-living space. The central square has daily events. People everywhere.
The success infected the nearby villages as well. Banya has multiple 4 and 5* hotels with mineral water.
I can see us going back with the goal to climb Vihren again. Not sure when. The summer season is over.
We tried and failed to go to Vihren peak this weekend. We got to the hut. The plan was to do Vihren hut – Vihren peak, which is 3.5h and +950 meters. However, the road to the hut is closed and there are frequent busses that go to it. We missed the bus and ended up doing Banderishka Polyana – Vihren Hut, which is +350 meters and 1-1.5h.
The attempts will continue but maybe next year. Vihren is no joke outside of the summer. The 24K steps we made were more than enough for us, and the thunderstorm that started at the end of the hike sealed the feeling that it wasn’t meant to be that day.
The storm washed our car perfectly well.
“The Sum of All Men” is an epic fantasy set in a world where the strong and powerful can extort and extract skills from ordinary humans. The poor give up their intelligence, strength, or beauty in exchange for care and protection for themselves and their families. Once they make this sacrifice, they become disabled and are kept in storage until their rune lord dies.
This is the most brutal magic system I’ve read. Most of the gifts come at a great cost, causing severe suffering on the donors. It’s not a typical RPG-style system where taking a thousand strength gifts makes someone superhuman. The strongest gift is metabolism, which grants extraordinary speed but each gift taken reduces the lifetime of the lord.
The main antagonist of the story has taken tens of thousands of gifts from people and has superhuman strength, speed, and healing. His voice can make the strongest people submit to his will. He wants to conquer the world and become the sum of all men, a person with the talent of millions. The main protagonist is also a superhuman of a slightly different kind – one that can get away with anything. He understand that taking gifts is evil. Who is going to win?
The top review on Goodreads is by Mark Lawrence, the author of Prince of Thorns. If there’s a fantasy book more cruel than Runelords, it’s Prince of Thorns. Mark Lawrence gave it a 4, and I would agree.
4*/5
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