Smelter PFRPGC Adventure Free on Amazon
A Pathfinder Role Playing Game compatible adventure for 2nd-4th level characters.
Free on Amazon from 6/3/2013-6/7/2013
Description
Important: This is a Pathfinder Role Playing Game compatible adventure. It is not a novel. It is also not an interactive Kindle “adventure book.”
While the mines of Ulthus produced a variety of high grade ores, ore is not particularly useful in its mined state—it has to be refined in a smelter. In order to prepare the ore, the Empire constructed smelters.
Now that the Regency is expanding into the region and the PCs have taken Ulthus, the next step is to reclaim the smelter of Ulthus from whatever howls within its blackened walls.
Downloads
See paizo.com/pathfinderRPG for more information on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
A Review of Travels in Elysium
Travels in Elysium
William Azuski
539 pages
2013
Iridescent
$18.90
While it is tempting to embrace subjectivism when it comes to matters of art, experience has shown me that what I feel about a work merely reveals what I feel. When I was more foolish, I took this feeling to reveal the quality of a work. However, I have found that works that I rather like can actually be of rather poor or dubious aesthetic value while I can also recognize the aesthetic merit of works I dislike. I make these points because honesty compels me to say that I did not like or enjoy Travels in Elysium, which is billed as “a metaphysical mystery set on the Aegean island of Santorini.” The work did remind me a bit of the most famous “metaphysical” mystery books, namely Dan Brown’s works—which I also do not like or enjoy. I do freely admit that the failing might lie within in me rather than within the pages of this book. I will, however, endeavor to present a just assessment of the work.
The protagonist of the tale is 22-year-old Nicholas Pedrosa who is drawn into the drawn out story by Marcus James Huxley, an archaeologist (or something like that). Huxley has found 5,000 year old writings on Santorini and Pedrosa is hired to be part of his expedition to uncover the ancient mystery of what happened to the people when their city was buried by a volcano. Unlike in Pompeii, there are no signs of the inhabitants. Pedrosa also walks into another mystery: Huxley’s previous “young assistant” has died.
Azuski endeavors to work in some philosophy, namely Plato’s (rather brief and not very philosophical) tale of Atlantis. Being a professional philosopher, I am generally interested when a work of fiction makes effective use of some aspect of philosophy. However, the tale of Atlantis is more a work of Platonic fiction than Platonic philosophy. The mere fact that something is written by a person who is a philosopher, even in the context of a philosophical dialogue, need not make the content philosophical. However, people tend to take a broad view of philosophy—most especially when it comes to the much distorted field of metaphysics. As such, this could be regarded as a metaphysical mystery with philosophical elements—at least in some sense of these terms.
In the course of the story, the narrative shifts around in time—jumping from the present setting to the distant past and back again. While I do enjoy a well done time shift in a narrative, the shifts in this novel are abrupt and rough in a way that seems to disjoint (rather than enhance) the narrative. I will note that some readers might be more adept than I in such matters, so perhaps this is a failing on my part as well.
Some critics have already pointed out that Azuski’s tale suffers from technical defects, namely in regards to his descriptions of how archaeology is conducted and how active and erupting volcanoes work. While such errors can be regarded as a defect in a work, I tend to go with Aristotle in this matter. That is, such errors are faults, but they are not defects in regards to the artistic aspects of the work. To paraphrase Aristotle, to badly present the facts of archaeology would be a factual error, but to present a story of archaeology poorly would be an artistic error. There is also the fact that, as readers will find, perhaps the seeming errors are not errors because of the final “twist ending” of the story. But, as just noted, from the standpoint of assessing the work as a work of art (and not a report on archaeology or volcanoes) what matters is the aesthetic qualities.
Some works are so well-written that reading them is like sledding down that perfect snow covered hill: the mind goes smoothly and pleasantly over the words. While such works can contain matters that must be wrestled with, the writing aids one in this struggle rather than impeding it. When I started reading the work, it reminded me of the times when my sled ran out of snow and hit patches of dirt or gravel—slow and painful going. Since I was asked to review the work, I pressed on. The sledding improved a bit, but it was rather like sledding in a storm—I found the work confusing (and not in the good way that a mystery should be initially confusing). Again, this could be a failing on my part—I am not, as a rule, much of a mystery fan. However, I will say that the author seems to overuse the red herring device and does not use it to good effect (that is, to advance the plot and enhance the mystery). It felt as if the author had written multiple stories and, not wanting them to go to waste, simply copied and pasted them into the text of the novel to serve as red herrings.
After 538 pages, the novel ends on page 539. To avoid spoiling to book, I will not reveal the “surprise” ending. However, I did find the ending disappointing and unsatisfying. I had hoped to at least be rewarded with an original and interesting ending after slogging through so much text, but this was not the case.
This novel had, I believe, considerable potential. However, it would have benefited greatly from some considerable pruning, editing and rewriting. While I did not enjoy the book, those who like Dan Brown might find this metaphysical mystery appealing. Kirkus has a very positive review of this book and I recommend that readers of this review read that to get an alternative view of the text.
Ruins of Ulthus Free on Amazon 5/16/2013-5/21/2013
A Pathfinder Role Playing Game compatible adventure for 2nd-5th level characters.
Description
After the Empire expanded into the Aegus region via the transport towers, Imperial scouts searched for valuable resources. Investigating tales about a mountainous island containing wealth and monsters, Imperial scouts (Althus, Altus, and Ulthus) located caverns that contained rich veins of copper-already being mined by Troglodytes. Eager for the resources, the Empire slaughtered many of the troglodytes and enslaved the rest as miners. A small village, Ulthus, grew up around the mines and a large town, Altus, grew on the coast. The influx of wealth enabled the town to thrive and even construct a theatre for the entertainment of the people. While the theatre was originally a place of the finer arts, as the Empire became more debased, so too did the performances. Eventually, corruption spread throughout the town, infecting even the church.
When the Cataclysm struck, Altus was cast into ruin. The theatre and those who frequented it became the focus of much of the curse. They were transformed to match the evil and depravity in their souls, creating a dangerous and vile show upon the accursed stage. The church also met a terrible fate, becoming a haven for undead beings.
While Ulthus was mainly spared the direct effects of the Cataclysm, the destruction of Altus gave the troglodytes the chance they had been waiting for. They rose up and fought their enslavers. The battle was brutal and costly, but eventually the troglodytes won and were free to go back to enslaving their own kind to work the mines for their mysterious masters.
Downloads
See paizo.com/pathfinderRPG for more information on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
Pirate Fort Pathfinder RPG Compatible Adventure Free on Amazon
A Pathfinder Role Playing Game compatible adventure for 2nd-3rd level characters.
Free on Amazon from 4/15/2013-4/19/2013.
Description
After the Empire expanded into the Aegus region via the transport towers, Imperial scouts searched for valuable resources. Investigating tales about a mountainous island containing wealth and monsters, Imperial scouts (Althus, Altus, and Ulthus) located caverns that contained rich veins of copper-already being mined by Troglodytes. Eager for the resources, the Empire slaughtered many of the troglodytes and enslaved the rest as miners. A small village, Ulthus, grew up around the mines and a large town, Altus, grew on the coast. The influx of wealth enabled the town to thrive and even construct a theatre for the entertainment of the people. While the theatre was originally a place of the finer arts, as the Empire became more debased, so too did the performances. Eventually, corruption spread throughout the town, infecting even the church.
When the Cataclysm struck, Altus was cast into ruin. The theatre and those who frequented it became the focus of much of the curse. They were transformed to match the evil and depravity in their souls, creating a dangerous and vile show upon the accursed stage. The church also met a terrible fate, becoming a haven for undead beings.
While Ulthus was mainly spared the direct effects of the Cataclysm, the destruction of Altus gave the troglodytes the chance they had been waiting for. They rose up and fought their enslavers. The battle was brutal and costly, but eventually the troglodytes won and were free to go back to enslaving their own kind in order to work the mines for their mysterious masters.
In more recent years and far away from AlthusIsland a great power arose in the lands of the Old Empire. Servants of this power have captured numerous Imperial transport towers and have made use of these to expand into areas once controlled or visited by the Empire. Recently a force of humanoids arrived on the island and established a fort. This fort serves as a base for a variety of pirate operations in the area. These pirates have been raiding various small islands in the area including AlthusIsland.
Downloads
See paizo.com/pathfinderRPG for more information on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
DIY: SSD & Headlights
(Photo credit: Tolbxela)
Today’s post is about two of my recent DIY projects (or, rather, DIM-Do It Myself). As a general rule, I endeavor to do as much myself as possible. First, I do this to save money and time. I work cheap and I do things quickly-plus I know I am always available when I need something done. Being sensible, I do consider the value of my time and will pay other people to do stuff if they can do it as good for less (in terms of the dollar value of my time). Second, I do this because I believe that people should be as self-sufficient as possible. I hold to this on both moral and practical grounds. Morally, a person is acting wrongly when he is an unwarranted burden on others-that is, he expects others to do for him what he could reasonably do for himself. Naturally, if a person cannot do it herself, hiring others is morally acceptable (in general). Also, being a competent human being is very useful. Third, I often find such things satisfying-it is nice to work with actual physical objects since I spend most of my time working with words.
Recently I repaired my door, my sink, added an SSD to my PC and “de-yellowed” the plastic headlight covers on my truck. I thought I’d share how to install an SSD and get the yellow out.
After reading an article in PC World about upgrading to a SSD (Solid State Drive) I decided to give it a shot. As I noted in an earlier post, this was an experience in blue screens-but it was ultimately worth it.
Now, as far as why you might want to do this upgrade to a desktop, the main answer is speed-an SDD is much faster than a traditional hard drive so you’ll enjoy faster boot times and your programs will be snappier. A secondary answer is that SSDs do not have moving parts (well, on the macro level) so they tend to break less than traditional mechanical drives. For laptops,an SSD is lighter and is vastly less susceptible to problems caused by motion relative to a traditional drive.
If you plan to upgrade a laptop, make sure that 1) you have the right (SATA) interface for the drive and that 2) you have the right sized SSD. While SSDs are generally laptop sized drives, they do not fit all laptops. In general, you’d want to get a 7 mm drive with an adapter unless you are sure of the size of your existing drive.
If you plan to upgrade a desktop, you will probably want to get an adapter so the SSD will fit into the normal drive bay-as noted above, the typical SSD is a laptop style drive and will not mount as is in a desktop bay. Fortunately, the adapter is cheap. If you are using a card (see below) that allow you to mount the drive on it, then you would not need an adapter.
Before spending any money, you will want to check to see what your options are and a rather important factor to consider is what sort of hard drive connectors your computer supports. Really old PCs have IDE connectors. If you have that, you should just get a new computer rather than spending money to try to stick in a SSD. If you have SATA connectors, check to see what version you have. My aging PC has SATA II. New PCs should have SATA III.
If you have SATA II connectors and want the most speed, check to see if your PC has a free PCI Express slot. These come in various sizes-such as the PCI Express x16 slot that is commonly used for video cards. Since my PC only has SATA II, I got a the Apricorn Velocity PCI Express card Solo X1. It will fit in a PCI Express x1 slot (or larger). This card (and others like it) add SATA III support and have a mount for attaching an SSD. The one I bought also has another SATA connector (internal) that can be used to speed up another internal drive.
Once the drive is on the card and the card is installed, be sure to format the drive. Once it is formatted, then clone your boot drive to the SSD. Since I was using the Apricorn card, I used the EZ Gig IV software. Since SSDs tend to smaller than traditional hard drives (my SSD is 256 GB) you’ll need to clean up your drive and will want to use what are probably the advanced options in the cloning software to only copy Windows and your programs. Cloning software tends to default to just copying everything-including any data or recovery partitions on the drive. Of course, you can also just do a new install on the SSD.
After you have your boot drive cloned (or Windows installed), reboot and set your BIOS so that the SSD is the boot drive. If you don’t get any blue screens, then you can enjoy the new speed.
Turning now to headlights, yesterday I decided to replace the headlight bulbs in my 2001 Tacoma. I noticed that the plastic covers over the lights were foggy and yellowed. I had seen various kits for de-yellowing headlights, but had also heard that Scratch Out (or similar products) would also do the trick. Since I had some Scratch Out, I put some on a paper towel and rubbed the plastic. Turns out that it does work. Of course, I suspect that even toothpaste would work. So, if you have yellowed/foggy headlights and some Scratch Out (or maybe toothpaste) give it a try
If it isn’t broke…
Wisdom comes with experiences that result from unwise choices. Unfortunately, experience can be like cheap tape-it might take a while to get it to stick.
Over the years I have learned the wisdom of not tinkering with my computer when it is working, mainly because one way to make it stop working is to tinker with it. As might be guessed I learned this by tinkering with many a computer. On the plus side, I know a lot about computers. On the minus side, this knowledge cost me a great deal of time and those nasty cuts you get from sharp PC components.
Today, my wisdom failed me. I decided to revitalize my 2009 PC by adding a SSD. It seemed simple enough: attach the SSD to the SATA card, plug the card into a PCI-E slot, clone and then reboot after adjusting the BIOS.
If you are a tinkerer, you know what happened next: blue screens. Not only did the clone SSD not boot, my original drive got whacked. I got that fixed and called it a day. But, I’ll get that drive to work…
Pirates & Merchants: Free Pathfinder RPGC Adventure for March 10-14
A Pathfinder Role Playing Game compatible adventure for 1st-3rd level characters.
Description
The success of the Regency in establishing peace and order within its domains has made life much better. Villagers no longer need to worry that they will be awakened by the bloodthirsty howls of gnoll slavers. Merchants can travel in safety from one end of the regency to the other with little to fear but going broke from bad business decisions.
However, one group now faces tough times: amateur adventurers. There is little for the starting adventurer to do within the safe confines of the Regency, yet the foes remaining near the borders tend to be so terrible as to make short work of those who are as foolish as they are weak. Because of this, many young adventurers have elected to seek alternatives that do not involve boredom or certain death.
Well aware that power and boredom are a dangerous combination; Regency officials have established various means to encourage these young adventurers to seek their fortunes in appropriate ways. Some are recruited into the Regency forces, often dying nobly fighting terrible foes. Many more elect to take advantage of cheap or even free passage to untamed lands that the Regency desires to claim.
While these lands no doubt contain foes leftover from the days of the Cataclysm and new perils, the possibility of reward is even greater. In addition to the loot to be gained from fallen foes and old treasure troves, the Regency is known to be very generous to those who serve its interests well.
You adventurers are among those who have boldly chosen to leave the safety of the Regency and take free passage to a place of suitable adventure via the legendary TransportTowers. You will be sent to the newly reclaimed island of Kalthos in the lands of Aegus. While the area is still something of a wild frontier, the Regency has already established a small presence on the island and there is a small village, Arthos, there. You are tasked with aiding the villagers and expanding the power and influence of the Regency in the area.
99 Books 99 Cents Kickstarter.
Available free from 3/10/2013-3/14/2013
Downloads
See paizo.com/pathfinderRPG for more information on the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game.
99 Books 99 Cents
The purpose of the 99 Books 99 Cents project is, shockingly enough, to publish 99 books for 99 cents. It is now live on Kickstarter, awaiting the generosity (or lack thereof) of the people.
History
Way back in the 1990s I created a Macintosh program called “Fallacy Tutorial” which, surprisingly enough, taught people about fallacies. After the program had been circulating the internet for a while, I started receiving requests to make the content available as text, then as a PDF file. Long after that, I started receiving emails asking me to make the book available for Amazon’s Kindle and this led to the publication of my first Kindle book, 42 Fallacies. This generated email asking me to make my work available for the Barnes & Noble Nook and I did so.
The recent budget cuts to education in Florida provided me with extended (and unpaid) summer vacations and I used this time to write numerous books. Since my two main interests in writing are philosophy and gaming, I wrote a mix of philosophy works and Pathfinder Roleplaying Game adventures. Seeing the volume of volumes I was producing, my father asked me how many I planned to write. Jokingly, I said “I’ll write 99 books…99 books for 99 cents.” I continued to produce books and when I had over twenty I realized that I could actually make good on what started as a joke. That is, I could write 99 books and make them available for 99 cents each (which is the minimum price for the eBook sellers such as Amazon).
Just as I had received requests to make my work available via the Kindle and the Nook, I received requests to make my work available via iBooks. I looked into this and learned that publishing directly through Apple and using their excellent software requires having a Mac and an iPad (to preview books). While I learned I could use a third party to distribute my books, I rather prefer direct control over my own work. Also, I tend to think that the main point of the iBook format is to take full advantage of the special features of this format rather than just distributing a chopped down, generic text file to all platforms.
Sadly, my G4 iBook proved to be unsuitable for the task of publishing books through Apple and my main writing laptop, an Asus Netbook running Windows XP, is starting to really show its age. So, I decided to attempt a Kickstarter project to secure the funds needed to complete my project properly.
Whatever the outcome of the Kickstarter, there shall be 99 books for 99 cents.
I’ve set up the project site here.
2012 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2012 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
19,000 people fit into the new Barclays Center to see Jay-Z perform. This blog was viewed about 150,000 times in 2012. If it were a concert at the Barclays Center, it would take about 8 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.
Click here to see the complete report.
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