But don’t worry, there are a few options to keep your resin warm:

• A chamber heater / PTC heater can heat the entire resin box.
• A fermentation belt, like the ones used for mead or kombucha, can heat the exterior vat.
• A ThermalVatBand is a direct-contact thermal tape with a regulator.

All of these options will get you to your goal, but each has its pros and cons. For example:

• A PTC heater heats the entire box, including the resin, which might not be ideal.
• A fermentation belt needs a thermal control system, unless you’re okay with the default temperature setting.

I chose the ThermalVatBand and installed it on the interior of my vat for fast thermal transfer. However, the creator of the TVB doesn’t recommend interior installation because it can be tricky. Resin is a slippery and invasive substance, so it’s important to get a good seal on the flash tape. In my first attempt, I had some trouble, but for my second install, I used wider flash tape and wrapped it under the vat before the fep tray goes in. This way, the longest runs of tape aren’t in the resin, which reduces the risk of a breach. After three months, I haven’t had any issues yet.

Now that I’m done with the installation, and had it in working order for the winter, I’m pretty happy with it. Honestly, if I hadn’t messed up in the beginning, I probably wouldn’t have gone for an interior install. But hey, it’s all good now and I’ve refined the process. The most important thing to keep in mind is to clean the vat thoroughly. Seriously, keep scrubbing until you’re rubbing off the coating. You don’t want any resin on your tape because it’ll dissolve the binding and leave you with a flapping piece of tape inside your vat. Yuck! Once you’ve cleaned it, make sure you secure it well and fold it back on both sides. Keep an eye on those corners too.

All in all, I’d definitely buy the ThermalVatBand again. It might be a bit more expensive than DIYing it, but it’s worth it to have everything in one package and a creator/owner to reach out to if you need help. Of course, your experience might be different, but for me, it was totally worth it.

(note this is just my opinion, I bought a TVB on my own)

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Christmas Eve dinner was something I had taken over in previous years and it was a time to enjoy a bit of the old and bring some real meat to the table so to speak. To catch up. To ponder the season. To goad on the future. To enjoy a pocket of something familial.

These two would spoil my son with more gifts than necessary. They also knew we could never do a lot so maybe they were compensating. Most years we just liked to share labors of love. We’re really pretty easy that way. 

Not knowing that the road was going to be slippery coming up I hope I was kind enough. This year has been such a rollercoaster it blurs things. I have a lot of things I hoped for them, for us, but we’re a squishy troublesome bunch.

After a year we are near the end of remodeling their home and with each bit of effort, thought, and consideration put in we hope they would have like what we crafted from their own efforts.

Tonight I sat on a stool and had a cup of boiled custard. One of my mom’s all-time favorite holiday drinks. I gave a toast and thanks in their honor. I miss them very much.

The post A Moment in Time, A Year Gone By first appeared on it's my island.

I disclaim that I’m still a plebeian when it comes to this field. Starting in May of 2019 with the help of a good friend I have learned quite a lot and am constantly being asked questions by others so I promised to write up a resource document on getting started.

As a lifelong learner, this field is exceptionally deep and talent diverse. Know that you will not know it all, but knowing good people that know more than you is key to having a good time whether you are flying, repairing, or pondering your next build.

Build, Fly, Crash, Repeat

You’re going to have problems. You are going to crash. You will likely start a fire at some point. You will have many oh-sh*t moments. You will spend a small fortune getting started, and if not careful, staying aloft. Caveat emptor.

You will also have the most fun you may have ever had. Feel the freedom that is only associated with skydivers and pilots. Laugh deeply at some of the crazy stunts you will pull off. And most definitely get to reflect upon your day by rewinding some HD footage by yourself, or hopefully with some good mates.

Are you cool with all that? Let’s begin.

Multidisciplinary Hobby

While you can get started for relatively cheaply, know that to make the most of this hobby you’re going to be picking up some skills you may or may not have. To build, you will be assembling motors, ESC boards, flight controllers, cameras, radios—so general assembly through mildly specialized tools you may not have on hand (hex/m4/m5), soldering, smoke-stopper power testing, logic board to computer testing, motor p-i-d tuning, general flight board configuration.

It sounds like a lot, and it is, but if you can assemble an IKEA dresser, you can probably handle this. It’s just lots of littles, testing, flight testing, and revisions. To fly, you’re going to fly simulators before doing the real thing, then going under some goggles for the FPV element, configuring a radio controller (LUA coder if you want to get deep) with a lot of potential switches, and flying outside of your body—oh and coming back (right?!) You’ll be testing motors, prop directions, how your tuning responds to your inputs, and a lot of iterations. Did I mention the invariable “um, what is going on” moments because you’re flying homebrew tech that will inevitably have a gremlin that may or may not be troubleshot easily.

I know, lots of concepts and new words above. Don’t worry. It’s meant to push the sandbox of your brain open with a bulldozer so we can build in it appropriately.

Start with a Simulator

I cannot, cannot, cannot, express this enough. Start with simulations. We live in a modern age with computers that can calculate pretty darn good physics, so use the tools before us to help build your mental map and hand-eye coordination that will be needed for your first real flights. Not to mention it’s a lot cheaper than wrecking a $200+ quad in the side of your house or having a fly-away that is never to be heard from again.

There may be more but these are the two most popular and so very well-honed:

• Liftoff
• Velocidrone

A while back Liftoff held the grand title but as I understand it Velocidrone has come a long way and is highly competitive, even more so if you are heading into MultiGP. I picked up Liftoff first because some of the videos I was watching liked it and via Steam community tied tutorials into home-built maps worked well. I’m now starting in on Velocidrone because our local GP guys are building maps and that’s pretty cool in itself.

You can start with either of these and if you’re like most of us, you own a game controller from an Xbox or a Playstation. You can use both through your computer and get started ASAP.

Caveat: If you do this the piece to remember and remember well is that a game controller pulls you back to the center of the joystick where your real radio controller will not. If it’s an old controller you can open it up and remove a tension spring that does this or just get your feet wet today and deal with the retraining as soon as you pick up a real controller.

Speaking of a radio controller, pick up a Taranis Q X7 and battery. It’s got enough channels for you to do a lot with, will scale over time, can run an open software called OpenTX, can plug via USB or dongle up to your computer to run sims, store profiles for your future fleet, etc, etc, etc.

If you pick up a radio and have a simulator, you are good to get started. Train, practice, experiment, watch videos, hone yourself. By the time you go to your next step, you will be much farther along and the risk of your first flight is mitigated by a lot.

Getting Started Quickly—a Bind and Fly

Two pieces of this equation to get started. You need something to look from and you need a device to fly. Currently, I don’t think people should be builders. You’ve simulated, you need something real world, and after the real world, you’re going to make a critical decision on whether to become a pilot with a fleet or that this just wasn’t for you. Better to keep your investments to a minimum to test the waters because if you dive in it is deep.

A bind and fly, also known as a BnF, is a fully operational quadcopter that just needs to be bound to a remote. There is another class of pre-builts called ready-to-fly (RtF) that is everything but the radio on-board the copter. Getting an RtF will require soldering so let’s avoid that for the moment.

What kind of BnF should you pick up? A Tiny Whoop. No question. They are 3″ large, usually wrapped in a plastic housing and can be flown indoors or outdoors (pretend I didn’t say indoors until you get better, lol.) Oscar Liang (which is a resource to remember) has a good breakdown on tiny whoops and it’s worth reading. I’d recommend the TinyHawk, Mobula7, or the Beta75 as a good one to pick up. They are all qualitative. They each can take a beating and will have longevity in your future fleet for just fun, to pass down to your kids, or have other kids fly if the teacher in you eventually comes out. Did I mention you can also run these right into others and everyone will be ok? Not a bad place to start.

If you’re like me, you’ll get your kids to chase it and you’ll use avoiding them to train you in collision avoidance, object orbiting, and many other acrobatic maneuverings which will translate to your future 5″.

Goggles, now this is a tricky decision. You can get a full BnF kit that comes with a radio, a breadbox goggle, and a Tinyhawk for relatively cheap. There are also other kits, and places that have offerings…

A Step Back, Expense Breakdown

Every endeavor has its cost. I’m not going to go all excel here, you can do that. Here are the pieces to the puzzle:

• Quadcopter (and all its myriad of parts)
• Radio Transmitter
• Goggles
• Potential, and Probable Repair Costs (have spares!)

A quad can run anywhere from $80-$350 (and far higher if you go long-range or install gimbals, or go Xclass—but $350 would put amazing parts in a 3″ through 5″ with spares.

Transmitters can run as cheap as $80 to $400. The breakdown will come down to channels you can control (things you can assign switches to or reroute information), built-in LCD panels for information or video relay, and form factor. Most transmitters you can also mod to put better (see smoother) gimbals, 900mhz modules, and other sundries. Again, the Taranis QX 7 has a lot of flexibility in its offering, growth, and cost.

Goggles, a very diverse set of answers these days. $100 to $600. Quite a spectrum, right? Build quality, receiver diversity, breadbox (one screen) vs binocular, field-of-view (30′-55+’), signal interpolation potential, LED vs OLED… Oh, and now DJI has entered the FPV fray, so even more cost and concepts. I started with some hand-me-down old Eachines that basically had a monocular vision (supposed to be binocular, hah!) My first upgrade was to the Fat Shark Attitude V5‘s which was a world of difference in quality. Now I’ve funded the Orqa’s Kickstarter project as a step up into the big leagues. The main reason for picking up two for myself was so I can have Logan in training as a ride-along and for his own use. Otherwise, I’d just sell the V5’s and pick up an external screen for people to pass around while I fly.

Your transmitter and goggle selection will be your main sunk cost. If you were to start and want to buy everything yourself out of the gate, you’d need around $300 in goggle + radio transmitter monies, and then your quadcopter running you a total of $400-$600. That’s a tough financial nut to crack not knowing if you even want to walk the path. On the other hand, spending $160 for a little Tinyhawk, radio, and goggles, knowing it’s kind of disposable or hand-me-down material at least gets you in the game without feeling way out of pocket. Then you can both reuse and replace most of the equipment in that bundle over time (check out this RTF review of the EMax).

Going back to investments, it’s always nice to know that a radio can be used to fly fixed wings (planes) to cars. They also hold their value pretty well for resale. The better the goggles, you can feed HDMI in and use them as another screen for whatever your pleasure. Just meaning as you pick up more qualitative parts, they have multiple uses over time which, to my money brain, makes the amortization of the investments travel farther out.

You do you!

This is all just a quick start guide to getting your feet wet. If you wish to follow Alice and ‘drink this’, then you can certainly go down far, learn, apply, and fly some interesting creations. If this has inspired you, fantastic. Here are some additional resources to get you moving. If you need help, reach out to me, and I’ll help how I can or direct you to more resources where I can.

Community Resources

• Reddit (/r/multicopterbuilds, /r/quadcopter, /r/fpv)
• RC Groups
• Radiocontrol/Multicopter Discord
• RotorBuilds (my first build)

Education (YouTube)

• Bardwell (and his site FPV Know It All <–great tool resource)
• Oscar Liang
• FPV Academy
• RotorRiot
• Know Before You Fly (rules are important!)

Equipment, Software, Shopping

• BetaFlight
• Open-TX
• Foxeer
• GetFPV
• Raceday Quads
• Banggood
• iFlight
• eMax
• Shendrones
• Fatshark, Orqa, eachine
• ..just touching the surface..

Friends & Skilled Pilots (YouTube)

• Mine! (Not skilled, but fun to see what I’m up to.)
• Nurk (Racer, Builder, Cinestyle)
• FPV Jesus (Local Friend)
• FPV Dreams (Local Friend)
• FPV Dreams (Local Friend)
• Mactac (Canadian Long Range)
• Jean-Quad Van Ham (Local Friend)
• Cricket (Georgia Pilot of >Skill)
• and so many more… really, lots of great people out there.

Blue skies!

The post Getting in to FPV Quadcopters (2019) first appeared on it's my island.

Equipment

I’ve had a lot of blenders over the years and while my Warren will outlive me I finally switched this last holiday season to the Ninja Smart screen / Kitchen System and have found it much easier to maintain quality control as well as feed a family worth of frozen treats faster and easier. If you aren’t in the mood for this size look into the Bullet sized systems. The main point is you have interchangeable cups which help get you out of the kitchen faster. The vacuum system in the Ninja I’ve also found to be helpful because many whey/milk protein shakes end up volumizing (growing too large) because of the available air. By pulling a bit of this out your smoothie will stay more condensed and less frothy.

The Composition

A dietary artist you become for a smoothie. Proteins, amino chains, vitamins, probiotics, fruits, flavors, omegas, etc. You pick what you want based on what you need for the day. Total MRP or just a healthy filler instead of that bag of powdered donuts. Let’s walk it through.

Protein

Back in the late ’90s, you ate chalk. By the early ’00s protein had finally found a path into your palate that was smooth and sometimes even undetectable. In the 10’s we have seen the rise of plant-based protein and sometimes using those feel like you’ve stepped back into the ’90s.

I’m a whey guy for the most part. I have no problem with pea or hemp-based proteins, they just require more out of you to get an exceptional product. I can’t recommend any that I am steadfast to since I’m still working through different variants. Where I can say I’ve settled for now in the whey categories is BodyTech’s Whey Tech Pro 24 (Vanilla). At $50 for 77 servings (.64c/serving) it clocks in at a very affordable protein/amino profile. 120 cals, 24g of protein, 1g sugar it’s a good based to build upon. I use this in a blended shake.

If you need a protein shake you use a shaker for I usually opt for something like Whey Isopure which goes in pretty much invisibly.

Flavors–I highly recommend only buying into Vanilla and Chocolate. If you want strawberry, add strawberries. You can always tilt vanilla to any flavor and chocolate will always be chocolate, but you’ll taste the synthetic every time if you try and find some fruity concoction. Just keep it simple and tweak flavors based on actual whole-foods.

Macro & Trace Nutrients

Macronutrients are easily found in a good diet. Here we aim to make sure you are rounding that diet out well. These fellas keep the body running happily, so adding them seems like common sense for a MRP. For this, I’ve stuck by one manufacturer nearly since their inception years ago. Vibrant Health Green Vibrance. This stuff is like a healthy bump. First thing in the morning this will wake you up almost like coffee. Mid-day, keeps you going. I lean towards the idea that it’s just bioavailability of goodness that is taken up pretty easily. I don’t quite ascribe to the probiotics elements of most edibles since the stomach is only going to pass along 2% of that but hey, if there are 25 billion probiotics then 2% of 25B is more than you might have gotten otherwise. Cost-wise it runs $70, for 60 servings you’re looking at $1.15 per serving. You’re free to range and try and compete here but a glance at the nutrient label will make you understand just how much is being put into each scoop. I’ve had this in my household for over a decade.

Healthy Fats

You can play here where you like. I keep a bag of hemp shells, chia seeds, flax seeds all in tins that I can scoop from. Another benefit of the Ninja Kitchen blender is it has an Extract mode which does a good job at taking seeds and pulping them well. Better to have your seeds whole until you need them than their powder forms so having a blender that can really tear them down before eating is a boon.

Pick what you like a scoop of each, make a jar of all of them, add your fish oil or what you like to round out great brain health and you’re moving on.

Fruit!

Now, this is your playground. Buy what’s in season fresh, buy what’s out of season frozen and enjoy mixing and matching to your heart’s content. Fresh fruit going bad? Dice it up and throw it on parchment or wax paper on a cookie sheet, freeze it, bag it, now you’re wasting nothing.

Peach season, peach smoothies. Blueberry season, blueberry smoothies. Strawberry… you get the idea. But it’s winter you cry! Ok, grab a bag of mixed fruits of different types when you see a BOGO at your grocery and now you grab a handful of that. We’ll talk about ice and ratios in a moment.

This above all else is your preference but the skies the limits. Avocados also make a great rich addition if you so desire. Experiment and find what you like. Pull up a nutrition loadout on the item if you’re really curious how it might impact you but unless you’re trying to keep a low GI then I don’t worry too much about this. You’re only going to add about 1/2 cup.

Liquids

Last main thing I’ll cover before some recipes to help out. What to add for liquids. I like to think about this as digestibility and caloric needs. Milk is slow to digest. Great for overnight smoothies to help you stay away from being catabolic but might not be great when you want to have a quick uptake. Also, it’s rather calorically dense. I’ve moved on to unsweetened vanilla almond milk and toasted coconut milks. Low in calorie, easily digestible, and really tasty in your smoothie. You can also cut any of the ‘milks’ with fruit juices. Just know you’re adding potentially a lot of fructose/sugar into your mix. However, if you are going for a really orange smoothie then OJ helps bring it fully around to what you’re creating.

In this category, you can also add yogurts and kefir. They will add a richness and will depend on your taste. I like keeping a bottle of vanilla yogurt and honey kefir around just to add variance. They also can be used to thicken a smoothie well for a smoothie bowl if you want to take more time to enjoy your meal.

Recipe Logic

I’ve been told some of you have no creativity, so let’s help that out. Real quick about frozen ratios: If you use too many frozen items, you’ll end up locking up your cups; if you use too little, you’ll have more liquid than frozen. With experimentation, you’re going to figure this out. The easiest rule of thumb I’ve found is to make sure you can cover your frozen goods with enough liquid + a little more. It’s that easy. I’ve also found it beneficial to fill ice > fruit > powders. If you do this in reverse, the powders might not blend fully (if you use a Ninja-based cup—if you use a standard blender, you’ll want this reversed. You really just want your powders and soft stuff blended before your ice/frozen items).

Quick aside: All of these recipes are built around the Ninja tall cups. Use the measurements on them for clarification. Scoops are based on the serving scoop in each jar. KISS.

Strawberry Smoothie

(based on Ninja attachable cups)

• 5oz Ice
• 4oz Strawberries
• 1/2 Banana
• Cover with liquids
• 1tbls Honey (if your strawberries are not sweet enough)
• 1 Scoop Green Vibrance
• 1 Scoop Vanilla Protein
• 1 1tbls Hemp Shells

Frozen Mangos Smoothie

• 4oz Ice
• 4oz Frozen Mangos
• Cover +2oz Liquids (Toasted Coconut does great here)
• 1/4c Yogurt / Kefir
• 1 Scoop Green Vibrance
• 1 Scoop Vanilla Protein
• 1tbls Hemp Shells or Flax

Nutty Chocolate Smoothie

• 5oz Ice
• Cover +2oz 2% Milk or other
• 1 Heaping Tbls Sunflower Butter
• 1 Tbls Nutella
• 1 Scoop Chocolate Protein
• 1 Scoop Green Vibrance
• 1 Tbls Honey (maybe—this is sweetness preference)

Super-Duper Green Smoothie

• 3oz Ice
• 4oz Wyan’s Berries & Kale
• 1/2c Baby Spinach
• 1/2 Avocado
• 1/2c Yogurt
• 1/2 Scoop Green Vibrance
• 1 Scoop Vanilla Protein

Are you seeing some basic patterns? Smoothie making isn’t rocket science. You want it to blend, so you can play the game ‘Will it Blend?’

Don’t want it so frozen? Less ice. Want to have to scoop it out of the blender, more. Don’t be afraid of your ingredients or your machine. If your smoothie locks up, pull it off the blender, shake it, and keep doing it. If it never unlocks, open it up and add some more liquid. There is no failure or real mistakes. (Well, except when you overfill like I seem to do regularly because I WANT SO MUCH—this can lead to a mess. Hah!)

Other than that, you go where your taste and ingredients can take you. The point of all of this is you should always have access to a healthy, clean, and delicious snack, meal, or filler for the day. The cost will net out around $2 – $3 per meal which I’ve found acceptable for the nutritional impact in my life.

I hope this has been helpful. If you have any questions, reach out and let me know.

The post Smoothie 101 first appeared on it's my island.

Yea. I got a bit involved.

It was a blast though. This book evolves quite nicely where its predecessor leaves off. Axel is thrust further into events out of his control, and the rest of the world that is on his side is trying to help him, elevate him, or utilize him—what does he want though?

To be as invisible as possible.

I find it all a bit weird in some senses. We have an artist, a hacker, a gamer—a gamer with some deep love of the sport and building of games, but when reality crosses his path, he really wants to introvert out of it like an inescapable gravity well. Meanwhile, nearly everyone from his lover, friends, cohorts, protectors, and parents, all have their heads screwed on really well and are working really hard at the reality that is before them—just not Axel.

Maybe some of this is his childhood and how hard that scarred him. It’s hard for me to relate, but that’s nothing terribly new. I really enjoy everyone surrounding Axel, but I’m not so much of a fan yet of Axel himself, yet. He’s grown from his YA origin and I can sense the man lurking in his psyche somewhere. I hope that we continue to see his maturation and engagement rise over the series term since everything else in my humble opinion is just freaking a space-fan-fun-fest of growing epic proportions. Hell, Brad could spin off some novelettes from other perspectives within the solar system and Earth to supplement here where our vision is obscured. Great world building is at foot here.

This book was one more stepping stone up to the stage that has yet to be fully realized. The engineering and technology, the politics, the craftsmanship to the world, its history, and the bio-collapse within a limited energy sphere, the utilization of a noosphere of biologicals rigged into technology. Freaking fantastic.

Come on board, have a good time, hold on to your own headspace because the traveling time is quick and you’ll go back and re-read elements trying to understand through a limited imagination and severely hampered visual cortex what-the-what is going on. After stepping out of the movie Ready Player One, I have some gleanings of how all this looks but I’d love to see it better—(any artist out there?)

Brad, keep up the good work. You’ve got momentum on your side and I hungrily await the embattled future to behold. This was a really fun ride and I’ll be re-reading it soon just to give myself a bit more time and a better pass at the dream you’ve made reality.

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This is a book of seasons. It had good seasons, smart seasons, tough seasons, and just hard to comprehend ones.. I really couldn’t stay submerged in this book. I tried. I desperately tried, but it told me early on that I couldn’t read this at bedtime because it required more neurons to process and then I didn’t find myself that attracted during the daylight–so I had to read it in really odd times of the day. Which for a pretty expeditious reader, mired me down considerably. So I qualify this with, it may just not be for me overall.

Qualified warning aside–this book had some interesting concepts and legs. We have multiple archs of thought coming along to hook together. It was a little hard to follow some of the threads and timeliness of it all. Some side stories which I’d have to re-read to see if they were connective tissue or just anecdotal time references or the human condition, I’m not sure.

The future has a squid in your head that eventually wants to turn us into something like automatons for reasons I’m still not fully understanding. A woman who can sidestep reality and travel across time and space–to somewhat limited control. A man of our times who is a want-to-be philosopher that stumbles into something that changes him, literally..

I don’t even know how I can ramble justice to all of this. The book moves forward at a pretty brisk pace. The narration of the future is handled pretty well; the story can be followed. The narration of the philosophic moments gets hard to follow because they are thick. Smart, but dense and very expositional driven and I’m not much for lectures unless we’re bantering. Our slip sliding girl of timeywimeyness is who I settled on and enjoyed the most. Her tale was a rough start but interesting in where it goes. It hits some way-way out moments that I can’t judge but enjoyed.

Overall, though, I’m not complete. I don’t have an understanding. Why did this happen? What was the motive of this or that? What happens after the climax of the book> We don’t know. In the darkness, we will twist..forever.

Maybe I’m supposed to understand, and my feeble intelligence is just not enough to do it justice. Maybe I missed some points in my struggles. It’s been known to happen. Just enter this tale with some trepidation, strong coffee, and a conviction to see it through. You might find it beneficial, or you might find yourself trapped on one of the rings of hell. Follow up, and we’ll chew the fat about it.

The post The Measurements of Decay, K.K. Edin first appeared on it's my island.

Enjoy this for a quick spy novel set in the Empire’s theme, but if you’re looking for more of the insanity that runs the gamut of the hexarchate, you’ll find it absent here.

The post Extracurricular Activities (The Machineries of Empire) first appeared on it's my island.

Let’s rewind. We have a working kind of generation ship whose goal is to leave Earth and set up an interstellar highway. The crew, engineered since birth for the job, wakes up, sets up a new overpass, then goes back to sleep, for eons. Over and over and over. It’s a wild idea overall.

A pretty omniscient computer runs the ship, CHIMP, that wakes up different groups at different times, manages the ship while everyone snores on. Easy! Right? Hah!

The problem is, there is no end. When do they stop, how do they know? This bothered me; it also bothered the crew. Programmatically, I’m really surprised at the frame that has to be built here. The winning scenario is that the many years removed Earth civilization will travel up to them through one of their gates and say, “Hi there! All done!”

That seems rife with problems. As my grandfather said, “Feces happens.”

The book is built upon this idea of waking, working, sleeping, rinse repeat, and figuring out a way to hide a mutiny within the pages, between the lines, so a sophisticated AI doesn’t know about it.

I enjoyed the book for the idea set forth. What I didn’t like was the trope activated. You have a one method win solution for the computer and crew to end on. That seems horrible from any point of view. Why didn’t the Earthers set up an iterative check-in, roll back concept after X (X=100) gates, or time-oriented? This binary situation creates everything of this mess and it’s hard for the technologist in me to grapple with that one fulcrum. The people who made the project, the AI, the amazing things to be described within are all hinging on a one-win scenario? Nah, that’s inconceivable.

I liked the idea, characters, technology, strange concepts, shadows in the dark, and unknown things to come—I just really had a tough time accepting the premise. Get by that, and you’ll be good.

The post The Freeze-Frame Revolution first appeared on it's my island.

Alex Verus, my favorite episodic British mage. Alex has come a long way from his little storefront helping adepts and normies. He strides on the line between Light and Dark, mainly finding a path of survival through it all for himself and his little band of mages. Not much has changed in that. He is playing bigger games on the council, but the outcome is still relatively the same. Stay alive.

We’ve been with Verus for nine novels now. The books are heavy in dialog and narrative with sporadic fires of magecraft. By book 9, I don’t know if we need such a breakdown in how the politics work. I kind of got glassy-eyed at being reeducated at how the council works. Anyone in their right mind wouldn’t be starting this late in the series, so let’s roll.

Going beyond, the series is in a pretty good place. Relationships are firm, enemies are well outlined, and Verus’ questionable character is finding his path forward. Movement, growth, evolution—I like. In this episode, you’ll get more council workings, plots, loose cannons, leaks, assassinations, and that new pesky dark Jinn. All are trying to move the Drakh saga forward more.

Which will bring up a tickling thought of how much farther does this series have to go? Maybe two more to culminate Richard? Then we could let Verus rest. Jacka has built a world, or at least a nation, with lots of room for exploration and usage of the ground rules we’ve learned about.

Anyhow, another good serial to read in the Alex Verus universe. If you’ve read up to now, you won’t stop even if I told you to. So, read on, it’s entertaining.

The post Marked (Alex Verus #9) first appeared on it's my island.

Auri! I am so glad Patrick gave her a moment in the moonlight. During the other books, I would tell my wife how much I enjoyed this girl/woman who would take the inanimate and give them something more. Not quite a life, but a place in the world. It delighted me to read this novelette.

Auri is a confused but very bright young woman. She has a past, and it eats at the edge of her, but for the most part, she keeps it at bay, and we stay in the dark over what it was. Which is fine, that’s not for this tale. Here we get to romp around the understructures of the academy and explore her world and quirkiness and the very strange and derelict structures that exist.

I liked this book. Patrick says it is not for everyone, and I can nod my head to that. It’s a life study of someone who is not quite right, or maybe they are right, and we are all wrong. Regardless, Auri is a treasure, and the way she finds what goes where and the study of those objects makes me continuously smile. I take a lesson from her and want to give gifts that have a bit of magic inside them. I’m not just giving you a pen but a story trapped in a vessel. Not just flowers but a spring smile on the lips of a child.

I hope Auri has a good life and we see more of her. She has some rough edges, and a good part of me wants to see her grow and have a life well lived.

The post The Slow Regard of Silent Things (The Kingkiller Chronicle #2.5) first appeared on it's my island.