After a 3-year long wait, my latest book is LIVE! amazon.com/dp/B0F4RGQXSJ?ref… Folks, "Preservation's Cost" has everything you crave in old-school fantasy. It's got dragons, giants, manticores and tarrasques, undead, scheming nobles, unethical sorcerers, angry druids, dwarven kingdoms, ancient ruins, haunted necropolii, powerful artifacts, and much, much more!

Well that fits

One of the sugar maples in my front yard, which I have named "the Harbinger," is starting to display the first subtle hints of orange in its foliage. Autumn draws nigh!

Watching season 3 of "Primal ", and every so often I am compelled to pause it just so i can admire the exquisite composition of the scenes and let my eyes linger on the graphical richness so i can savor it like it deserves. Masterful production.

Sent this to the zoomer engineer intern I am mentoring. Told him to get everything here for his inspection kit, except swap out the crossbow for a tape measure, and the poison for hand sanitizer.

I can remember being a little kid during the 1970's and wondering why so much of what I saw on TV was weird and bizarre. Obviously, this was way before I learned about drugs...

Ten years too late, but I'll take what I can get.

So last night I went to bed shockingly early. I was mentally too tired to write any more, and lately movies don't interest me, for some reason. Naturally, I woke up at 3:30 am. But here's the interesting part: I lay in bed for the next 1.5 hours in delicious repose, drifting in a state of semi-consciousness, and I literally got 5 new writing ideas that I know I would have struggled to devise if I had been fully awake and sitting at my laptop. To be clear, they were little, small things: the name of a cult, a type of trap in a cave system, the way a satanic ritual would be conducted, but it was nonetheless thrilling to realize that my subconscious was working on several writing issues for me even though I had not directed it to do so. I felt like some kind of dreamy Victorian aesthete conjuring visions of splendor and dread, harnessing the full potential of my innate faculties, rediscovering the creative techniques of the decadents of yore... There were definite echoes of Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" there. I need to replicate this effect, preferably without the opium.

I've got the front door open and am listening to birdsong this morning. Spring birdsong is peak. Very soothing.

I would probably be a lot more concerned about the latest AI developments if I had any inkling of what the jargon meant. The incessant use of coding lingo [?] is quite the barrier for the 99.9% of us who aren't coders. "This Cloudy-Anthropic code just found a 2.3 pico-second fork vulnerability that would have taken a regular RAMSEC device ten image stacks to configure, and it did it all without loss direction or tweaking from the vibe project team!" OK. Sounds like the usual nerd pretentiousness coupled with the breathless finance guy talking his book to juice up an imminent IPO.

I watched the 1st Season 2 episode of Fallout last night (it was pretty good). I am quite taken with the Mid-Century Modern "High" American aesthetic that the show has perfectly distilled and supplied in concentrated form in the various flashbacks. Of course, IRL we were cheated out of the glorious retro-future we should have gotten. But it's crazy to think that our parents lived through the apex of American power in the 50's and the first half of the 60's. Just consider if that societal state had persisted, and the cars, music, design, fashion, mores and manners and everything else had continued on, slightly changing, but only to become even more so such that the period's identifying characteristics were intensified and refined to an apotheosis of Peak Americana. I suppose this is another variation of "This Is What They Took From You."