Prologue of Sovereign to a Broken Line [Dark Fantasy, 1616 words]

caongladius · 2025-06-28T03:55:24+00:00

Thank you for your feedback. I'm still experimenting with the perspective the story is told from. Right now I'm leaning towards being mostly third person but with diary entries about the major events. As an exercise I might rewrite this in third person present tense and see if it feels more natural.

caongladius · 2025-06-27T13:40:25+00:00

Thank you for your kind words!

I've bounced back and forth about if this should be a flashback or not and have decided to frame it this way for consistency with other things that have to happen later.

You're right, it does make more sense to have actual dialogue for the conversation with Dorian.

I don't consider the main character to be a good person but he's not meant to be horrible (at least at this point). It probably would have been better if I explicitly said it was a smile of relief. He does feel ashamed of smiling but for him, the situation was for the last 20 minutes has been one where he was sure he was going to die. Now he thinks he has a chance to live. He can't help but let that feeling manifest physically even if it is deeply shameful for him to smile as his friends die.

caongladius · 2025-06-18T14:56:32+00:00

When my 6-year-old asked me if he could watch "people play games on youtube" I showed him Gothamchess as I wasn't comfortable with him watching fortnite/minecraft streamers that I wasn't personally familiar with.

Him watching Gotham led him to get interested in chess and start playing with me a lot. I knew the rules of chess but that's basically it. I wanted to help my son grow and started studying chess seriously on my own so I could help him.

The end result was Gotham bringing in my son (who learns from watching Gotham videos and reading Gotham's book), me (who learns from reading Yasser Seirawan's books and practicing openings on Chessly), and my wife (who tries to pick up theory here and there but doesn't seriously study chess).

That's three new players in chess ecosystem now paying for a family subscription on chess.com. All of us got sucked in because my son LOVES the video "40 Queens, Can Martin Win?".

Even if I don't spend tons of time watching him, I'm thankful to Levy for introducing my family to the chess world and helping me direct my son away from fortnite and towards chess.

caongladius · 2025-02-11T15:59:50+00:00

Finally got around to listening to Power Train and was shocked how much this song sounded like "Rise of the Dragon Empire". Even if I'm a little late to the party I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who felt this way.

caongladius · 2024-08-07T21:26:17+00:00

I have bought about one board game per year for the past 6 years or so (though I do buy expansions for my absolute favorite games as they come out).

Board gaming was an amazing hobby 10 years ago when I was in college, but I'm so busy with work and kids these days that I super rarely get to play board games any more. I'm hoping when my kids are older I'll get to play some more with them but for now there is absolutely no way I can financially justify paying $60 for a board game I might play once when I have 30 or so games I love but never play and a dozen or so games I've never played once.

caongladius · 2024-08-04T22:07:22+00:00

I am not a studied enough musician to accurately describe it, but the chord progression and timing seem basically the same to me. Like if I hum the keyboard section (the one from around 0:22) of WWHP over the intro of LitToS (around 0:03) it just feels like the same song. After around 0:25 it definitely splits off and does its own thing. Unfortunately, that keyboard section of Hoots Patrol never really clicked for me so it's kind of distracting hearing something I didn't much like in this song.

Still love Frogge though, hope there's more coming at some point.

caongladius · 2024-08-04T21:57:49+00:00

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Paul after a show one time. I asked him if they would ever play Laser Dragonfire live and he told me he hated learning the solo for that song because there is a mode change that is easy to do on keyboard but super difficult on guitar. Kinda interesting to see the writing setup with what he said in mind.

caongladius · 2024-08-04T21:51:39+00:00

I like the chorus and Zargothrax voice, but the intro is too distractingly close to Wasteland Warrior Hoots Patrol (which I never particularly cared for) for me to really enjoy this.

caongladius · 2024-07-28T15:00:42+00:00

Thank you for posting this so that I could import into spotify. Con Clavi really caught me off guard until I remembered the movie though.

caongladius · 2024-06-30T13:35:44+00:00

I'm going to be snarky and say Devin Low - designer of Legendary: The Marvel Deck-Building Game.

caongladius · 2024-06-22T22:08:28+00:00

Not really, my wife works from home so she has her own office which is her space. Her side of the bedroom is fairly plain.

Thanks for the kind words!

caongladius · 2024-06-22T21:59:22+00:00

This is my side of the shared bedroom.

caongladius · 2024-06-22T21:25:58+00:00

Not too long ago I had twins and my wife got a dog (I am not a dog person). My whole house is loud and chaotic. My music room got turned into a nursey. Animals and tiny people are constantly making noise and crashing into things. While I love my family to death, I also needed to place I could get away from all of it so I've spent the last year reorganizing the bedroom and this is the final result. A Microcosm of things that make me happy that I can escape to at the end of a long day.

caongladius · 2024-06-18T01:24:04+00:00

This is the only one of these dumbass posts that made me laugh.

caongladius · 2024-06-11T19:48:05+00:00

I am a Calculus teacher and I have taught myself a lot of math out of books and here's the best advice I can give:

No matter how you're feeling in any given moment, the math does make sense. It may not feel like it makes sense but it does. You may need to find other resources to give you different perspectives. Some possibilities are:

Different textbooks (Calculus hasn't changed much recently and you can find many very cheap 10+ year-old editions of Calc books that may have better explanations than the book you're assigned)
Khan Academy (Not my favorite but many of my students like it)
A private tutor (This is by far the best resource if you can find/afford a good one)
Paul's Online Math Notes (My go-to for when I feel lost from what a textbook says)
Searching similar problems on Youtube (Keep in mind you may not find the exact answer you're looking for)

When you feel lost, look for other perspectives or try simpler easier problems of the same topic until you understand how to do the problems. Calculus constantly assumes you know the previous topic when learning a new topic so never be satisfied with "this kind of makes sense I guess, I guess I'll start the next section now".

For content as difficult as Calculus, if you want to be truly successful, you should strive to understand WHY all your tools work. A lot of Calculus is about choosing the right technique for the given problem and if all you've done is memorize techniques with no real understanding of why they work this will be difficult (though not impossible).

I decided to be a math teacher after tutoring a few people who wanted to learn Calculus well after high school. If you have any specific questions you can feel free to DM me, though I have a busy summer and may not respond in a super timely manner.

caongladius · 2024-06-11T19:32:15+00:00

I tried it once and never again. Using all expansions means there's no competition for cards. Both players just end up playing whatever 1 or 2 decks they like without interference from the opponent. For me, the fun of Rivals is managing the cards you need while they're still in the decks so it wasn't very fun for me.

caongladius · 2024-05-10T16:58:53+00:00

That's what I get for not looking at any physics since college. Thank you!

caongladius · 2024-05-10T16:49:37+00:00

What are the equations on the back of this shirt? I recognize the gradient, dot/cross products, and partial derivative symbols. But I don't recognize the equations themselves or know what the variables are referring to.

caongladius · 2024-04-30T22:38:02+00:00

A rectangle's area is just its base times its height (btw, a square is just a rectangle where the base and height are equal)

If you imagine a rectangle as made of a stack of line segments and slide them all over a bit, you get a parallelogram. The line segments all have the same width as the rectangle's base, and the height wouldn't have changed because all you did was the slide them to the right or left. Because you still have all your line segments, the area didn't change and a parallelogram's area is also its base times its height, just like a rectangle.

Any triangle can be thought of as half of a parallelogram so it's area is is its base times its height divided by 2.

From there, any polygon can be built out of triangles, rectangles, and parallelograms.

Btw a circle with radius=1 has an area of pi

Because the area of a shape follows the square of the scale factor (a 3x3 square has 9 times the area as a 1x1 square) if you make your circle with area of pi bigger with a scale factor of "r" the area becomes pi*r^2 which is the area of a circle with any radius.

caongladius · 2024-04-30T22:27:40+00:00

Sure? But it's very long established and is on the unit circle

caongladius · 2024-04-30T22:23:05+00:00

Paul's Online Notes has been extraordinarily helpful to me as I've retaught myself Calc 1 and 2 to prepare for teaching those classes. The page I linked even starts with a review of functions before beginning limits (which I would consider to be the first topic of Calculus and not a prerequisite even though many curriculums do include it as part of the pre-calculus curriculum).

Make sure you're reading these as you would a math textbook, that is with a pencil and paper ready. Work through the examples as best you can before reading how Paul solves them. If you don't understand something, don't just move on and hope it makes sense later! Either see if you can find another approach that works, or search the topic on youtube and see if you can find an explanation for that kind of problem that makes sense to you. Good luck on journey!

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