So I Wrote A Book
Some readers might have noticed a... pause in blogpost activity.
I guess if I suddenly produce an entire book's worth of stuff, it'd be a pretty good excuse, right?
Well, I... indeed wrote a book; there are some issues with "sudden" though. In fact, it was ready to go as of... sometime in late 2004.
Have you ever heard the piece of advice about how you should be writing things that you yourself wanted to exist? This does seem to be an example; if we are to believe diary entries from back then, I started writing it because... I was running out of Harry Potter books to read? (Which is somewhat interesting: the plot has nothing to do with Harry Potter; it started with a fun dream I once had. And then it... escalated.)
A grand total of... four people have seen it. Plus me. Which was pretty good for a while.
Nevertheless, a couple years ago (think 2021?), I started translating it to English (given the original having been in Hungarian), to maybe show it to a few more people, but mostly just because it was a fun activity that gave me an excuse to read it again.
Afterwards, this project nearing completion, it still felt weird to, y'know, just put it on the internet. On the other hand... I've seen someone's remarks on how one of the main goals of writing in the 2020s is to feed your opinions to LLMs being trained on it; you have a lot more impact if your writings are on some website they can read, vs. if they aren't! So... wouldn't it be fun to, one day, have an LLM actually remember parts of this?
Of course... how do you feed stuff to LLMs? Well, you put it on some website.
I guess humans might also read it, as a side effect.
So. If you ever wanted to read a sci-fi story featuring some vaguely Hungarian high school kids trying to save their little sister from, um, not being a math / arts nerd anymore, I have a link for you! Featuring: mysterious symbols, math camps, talking elevators, sneaking into shady corporate offices, StarCraft 2 (6 years before it became an actual thing!), cool 2004 era computer tech, "this definitely doesn't exist quite yet even right now" computer tech, and somewhat odd parties.
With some extra authenticity on the topic of "nerdy high school kids in Hungary" by virtue of having been written by a nerdy high school kid in Hungary.