September 2020

Hopefully this month is the month I spend editing and publishing, with little time spent on messing with the website. I spent the end of August getting the first chapters ready, but more time was spent getting the website setup so I don’t need to spend time on it. I edit each chapter, give it a few days or few chapters, then come back to review it. I fix any problems I notice, then mark it as ready to go out on the next free day.

Obviously, I had some bugs to figure out and some things to learn about hugo. I’m much better acquainted with it, so I guess one goal got accomplished.

I’m going to put Editor notes in the update posts instead of the actual posts, I want to keep the actual posts as clean as possible.

Editor Notes:

1

How weird is it that the name for humanity’s home planet is a synonym for dirt (in English)?

Technically this was up since I wanted to have 1 post up while I was optimizing the site. I don’t want that to happen for later posts.

3

I decided that I would use magic energy as the name for internal magic power. I got annoyed that you had magic powers and magic power and that was getting confusing. Calling it magic energy makes it obvious. I tweaked 2 after normal release to keep the names consistent. Any relation to Dr. Strangelove is coincidental.

4

I think I like instantiate as the word for making a magic spell? into being.

5

Realized there was a space for a context menu taking up 1/3 of the page width.

If I write an original isekai, magic spells are going to involve topology. The people of the world probably won’t understand that magic circles are defined by topology, but the isekai’d person would be able to figure it out. Something like power is defined by the canonical number of crossings. So they’d know the circle, trefoil, and figure 8 knot, the isekai-er would know enough to model the knots with string and create > 4 crossing magic.

When Al was talking about a strong wind, it reminded me of when I rode Fury 325 in the front row. Man, roller coasters are so great. “You can’t go wrong with a B&M hyper.”

I was able to sneak in a reference to a certain musical this time.

6

My family managed to line up 5 kids in a row with 3 years between each pair.

I decided to bump up the font size one size. The theme I used was built on tachyons, so I just changed from f4 to f3.

Lol, nominal. Almost did norminal, but who would get that joke.

7

So I’ll sometimes get on a kick and watch various tradies on Youtube around a certain trade. I’ve done beekeeping, wasp removals, furniture restoration, and most recently HVAC repair. Hoo boy, making an air conditioner is more difficult that you might think.

8

Nothing much to mention. I’ve gone fishing and caught something once in my life. Don’t care to repeat it, though I’ll eat fish someone else caught.

Didn’t spot many issues in the Review, am I getting better or do I need to get back to making drafts to clear my mind?

9

On a roll, tweaking then moving on.

10

Penultimate on the review streak, then bed. All the Sep 09 reviews were in one sitting, I just got on a roll and kept them coming.

Minor tweaks only, though I did have some funky wordings left in.

11

Imperial/British units are funky because they’re based around agricultural measurements. A mile is 8 furlongs, and a furlong is the length of a standard furrow in a plowed acre. A standard furrow is the length that a team of oxen can plow without needing to rest, though it got standardized into 40 rods. A rod is a 16.5 foot tool used by surveyors, and also a measurement of the same length. An acre is 10 plowed furrows wide, which was the amount a single man with a single ox can till in a day. So an acre was defined as 1 furlong by 4 rods. Also, at some point England shortened their foot, so the rod was 15 original feet, but they didn’t want to re-survey all the land, so they redefined the rod so it was the same length. A lot of the funky Base 60 stuff is from the Sumerians, but it remains because it’s easy to divide by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30.

So British units may seem crazy, and they are for a modern person, but their definition was sane when they were originally defined.

Also I went with ‘forgetful character’ instead of Doraemon (cat shaped robot).

12

So I had read a few Reversi/Othello guides so I don’t edit this chapter into nonsense. I can now play the game, woo?

So X-hitting or C-hitting only show up in other translations, I can’t find the term used in Reversi/Othello strategy (in English). So instead it got turned into Edge Creeping and Unbalanced Edges because those terms do show up. If those are real reversi/othello terms, then Google really failed me.

Also, how did this world not have any games? Mancala, Draughts (checkers), etc. have been around for a long time on Earth?

13

I really wanted to make an Eggman reference at the end, but I chose to not mention Pink Flamingos. I often want to put in references to odd things, maybe if/when I write my Isekai?

15

So I use Arithmetic instead of Mathematics when I refer to the lessons. The way I see math education is you learn arithmetic (add/subtract/multiply/divide/powers/roots), then algebra (variables/equations/plots/quadratic equations), geometry (area/volume), then move into more complex algebra, then calculus, then advanced mathematics. Yes, I know that advanced mathematics ends up with a bunch of things under it. When most people you know topped out at Calculus I or less, you start to simplify. Looking at what is described, I feel they’re doing arithmetic and simple algebra (maybe).

16

I have a Roomba, it’s name is Donald, not named after the American president. Screws up plenty, but less than the president.

17

So, I realized I was writing Capital instead of Capitol, and had to look it up. Capital means both “money employed or owned by a business/person” and the “city that is the official seat of goverment” and capitol is “the building occupied by a legislature”. I had to go back and fix a reference that used the wrong one in 14, but it hadn’t even been reviewed at that time. This is why I wanted to have multiple chapters in progress, to catch continuity errors and spelling consistency.

18

Dang this chapter is long. I almost broke it up into parts, but I ended up revising in parts instead.

22

I didn’t feel like learning Shogi, so some of the piece names may be wrong. Also another long chapter, this one got through draft after 23 and 24. Also, the more I do this, the more I can see when other translations aren’t doing much rewriting beyond the basics.

Also, how is Alfred so dumb sometimes? I’m glad this chapter got skipped in the manga.

23

I was so sad that Mina didn’t get to try the hamburger steak, I ended up editing the top and bottom into that point, kinda odd now that I think about it…

I’m reviewing and releasing the day of, I’ve been busy with things and needed yesterday evening to relax. There’s not much I’ll need to do this weekend, so I can get more ahead of editing and reviewing.

24

I need to harvest my potato crop soon. Potatoes for weeks! Also another long chapter… :(

30

I haven’t been writing many of these recently. Once I committed to the 2 per weekend day, I’m having to buckle down and get them done. This is the point where I’m getting closer to a working pipeline. Also, I reworked the deployment system so the posts and In Progress pages aren’t days out of date when deployed. Now the deployment script finds the post for the day, moves it out of draft and sets it to today’s date before committing the change and deploying it. I pulled in 31-40 before going to bed tonight. 35 is looking bad and 40 looks horrific. 2500 words is a hefty boi, and 40 is 3000.

End of Month

So to round out the end of the month, I’ve managed to confuse the deploy script, but I also put time into writing a theme/font chooser for the site. You click the Settings header link, and you can pick between 3 themes, 3 fonts, a bunch of font sizes, and margins. Besides the font sizes, I’m going to keep tweaking all the other options as I have time. And I’ll probably end up tweaking the font sizes for good measure.

At the time of writing, I’ve been doing this 37 days, and released 27 chapters. I’d like to get chapters greater than days by the end of October. See you next month.

Editing Statistics

Beers Consumed

  • Jamil’s Evil Twin IPA
  • Kolsch (generic)
  • Obi-ron’s Wheat
  • Chinook IPA
  • Grapefruit Radler

Music

  • Bardcore
  • Ska
  • Aphex Twin (Selected Ambient Works)
  • Irish Descendents (and similar)
  • Test Shot Starfish (and similar)
  • Moon Hooch
  • IDLES
  • Run the Jewels
  • Fallout 3 Galaxy News Radio