Tim Craire's Blog

SwornBorn: A Musical! (new serial book)

I’m publishing a serial fantasy novel on Royal Road, which is free (as works there always are): SwornBorn: A Musical!

Flicker, a young man eking out a living as a musician in a backwater hill town, learns of a hidden treasure hoard; but between him and the hoard are kobold colonies, angry giants, and the SwornBorn Dwarf clan. But also – tons of songs!

The first chapter alone features the hits:

-Weak Chicken Prisoner of the Dwarves
-Toadstools
-SwornBorn (Dance Cut)
-It’s Not Easy (Being a Dwarf-lord)

By way of an excerpt, here’s a song about the origin of the hoard; Flicker’s uncle, Slade, amassed it through dubious trading:

Long-buried skeletons; barrow wights’ blades;
dark-arts charm necklaces pilfered by maids;
unaware unicorns trapped in a glade;
these things wound up with your good Uncle Slade.

Sacrificed scimitars thrown into rivers;
jackalope antlers and hippogriff livers;
Elven love letters and borrowed dwarf gold;
these are all things that should never be sold.

Votives from pilgrims and candles from altars;
bright sterling censers and gold-embossed psalters;
offerings left for some god or a spirit,
are sacred to some, but our Slade wouldn’t hear it.

Thick hidden sovereigns dug up from fields;
gifted gold axes with matching kite shields;
veterans’ discharges carved into metal;
all this, and other loot, Slade tried to peddle.

Link: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/105985/swornborn-a-musical

Probably-unwise purchases I’m considering, part 3: Burning Banners

I play a lot of board games; and first off, this game is perfectly fine — I’ve played it now and I don’t mean to criticize it.

But I was thinking of buying my own copy, without having played it, and that wasn’t necessary; two friends own it, it turns out. And . . . it has a wee bit more of down-time as players take their turns than I would ideally like to see. I’m sure I’d have fun with it if I played it more; but, in terms of this series of posts . . . here’s something which I did hold off buying, and I can live with that decision so far.

They say “tariffs” . . .

I say — smuggling opportunities!

Probably-unwise purchases I’m considering, pt. 2: A trail cam

Update/SPOILER ALERT: I bought one.

I’ve seen photos and videos online that people get from trail cams, and I’ve thought about getting one for a while. They’re always from people in rural areas, though, and we’re suburban.

But we do have a park behind our house. It’s very narrow, maybe twenty yards wide, just a walking path and some other land next to a stream; but there are definitely raccoons, deer, rabbits, foxes around.

It still feels a little silly to get a trail cam to see these animals, though, since they’re not shy and we see them regularly anyway; for example:

Maybe with a trail cam, we’d be able to see deer around our house!

But I’m intrigued by the actions of at least one yard rabbit we have around here. It’s a survivor, because we do have foxes as I mentioned. If it’s just one rabbit we’ve seen, then we saw it first around April, when it was tiny; it was frequently around during the summer; in the autumn we seldom saw it, and we thought maybe a fox had gotten it; but then we saw it twice in November.

But we hadn’t seen it since. So once again, we thought it might have perished . . . BUT then with the snow we got last week, I saw these:

A-ha! I’m pretty sure those are rabbit prints? There are many squirrels around, also, but theirs look different . . . with smaller paws, as you would assume.

So, I want to see what that rabbit, if that’s what it is, is up to at night! So, I ordered a trail cam. It’s about $120; a Garde Pro that has good reviews and seems easy enough to use. Stay tuned for photos.

Trying to mess with the Washington Post’s AI

The Washington Post recently instituted an annoying new comments system, for comments on articles. It used to just show all the comments, and give readers a chance to thumb-up the ones they liked. The reader could then choose to see comments by time of posting, or by number of thumbs. Easy enough.

The new system often offers an annoying (in my opinion) writing prompt, for comments. (I find this annoying because I’m able to come up with a comment on my own; I don’t need a prompt.) The new system also allows readers to choose from four reactions, all positive; “clarifying,” “new,” “thoughtful,” and one other I don’t recall. I don’t find that annoying, really, but it’s no improvement over the previous system. Finally, the new system offers an AI-generated summary of the comments, after about 25 are posted. This summary includes a disclaimer saying that you should still read the comments, because it might be inaccurate . . .

I didn’t ask for the AI; I find it distracting and annoying; I don’t find it any better than a human, and I’d prefer that a human have the job; et cetera; so I tried to crush it recently.

I read a lot of soccer articles on the Post. The frequent commenters on those articles are a relatively small community who in many cases have been commenting for years, and in some cases even know each other outside the comments section. So I thought they’d be a good group to try to enlist to manipulate the AI summary.

(They’re also a group which is more friendly than most commenters, in my opinion, although that’s changing a bit with articles about the District’s pro men’s team, DC United, because DCU’s owners are not investing in it, and readers are getting bitter.)

Okay, so I picked a recent article which was about a roster choice for the U.S. men’s national team. It was about a certain player — Matko Miljevic — who was invited to join the next camp. (The article was written by Steven Goff, the longtime Post soccer writer who deserves better than my manipulation, sorry Mr. Goff, love you man, but AI must be fought.)

In an early comment to that article, I . . . or maybe I shouldn’t admit it was me. Okay then, in that article, SOME COMMENTER asked all the other commenters to write something about Jeff Agoos, instead of Matko Miljevic.

Jeff Agoos is a former pro soccer player who played for many years for the US national team and also for DC United. I picked him because he is very well-known in soccer circles and I THINK has a very good reputation as a good player and decent guy. (As George Orwell wrote about Gandhi, “what a pleasant smell he has left behind him.”) I’m also pretty sure he still lives in this area.

My fellow commenters obliged. Most of the comments completely ignore the thrust of the article, and instead just praise Jeff Agoos.

So that was cool! Unfortunately, there were only 18 comments total, and the AI summary doesn’t kick in until there are more, maybe 25 or 20.

Here’s the article llink btw: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2025/01/06/usmnt-roster-matko-miljevic/

BUT on a subsequent article — and this happened more organically — the AI was indeed taken for a ride because it parroted an idea which was raised as a joke by commenters; this is a frequent joke made by this community, the idea that DC United will definitely win the league championship in the coming season. This is clearly a joke because the article is all about how DCU is putting together a budget roster. The AI summary:

Well done lads.

Probably-unwise purchases I’m considering, Pt. 1: A Roman denarius

This may be the first of a series about things I probably shouldn’t buy.

I visited Spain in 2016 and brought back a bronze Roman coin that had been minted there in the first century A.D. (It depicts two brothers, Nero — not that Nero, a different one — and Drusus, who were briefly in line to be emperor, until they were both killed, Princes-in-the-Tower style, clearing the way for [eventually] Caligula.) It was surprisingly affordable, just sixty bucks or so. It’s a nice memento of the trip.

So I thought, maybe I should get an old coin from everywhere I visit. And last summer, my wife and I visited England to bike the Hadrian’s Wall cycleway. We loved it . . . I want to do it again and see a few things we missed.

And it turns out again that there are plenty of associated Roman coins out there which are affordable, in my opinion. When you hear about hoards of coins that are found by metal detectorists, many of them wind up for sale to the public. (Legally. It’s all good.)

One, pictured here, is from the Dereham Hoard, which was over 1,000 Roman coins found in 2004. It shows Julia Domna, the wife of the Roman emperor Septimius Severus; who, coincidentally, spent time in England and Scotland (laying waste to lands and locals as the Romans were wont to do). It’s just 95 pounds, so, 130 bucks or so delivered here to the US.

Isn’t it cool? I think so! I could own this piece of history.

But . . . what would I really do with it? How often would I really look at it? How many people could I share it with who would care?

When I think of owning it I sometimes picture myself like Gollum, crouching there fawning over it and talking to it . . . my precious . . .

It might not be a wise purchase.

In terms of things I have which remind me of that fun trip we took, I still have the Hadrian’s Cycleway guidebook I bought beforehand, and also a small guidebook to the castle in Newcastle, which have a lot more information and were just . . . much wiser purchases . . .

The verdict

(Post 4 of 4)

Wildly different stories about the killing of John Hasson appear in newspaper articles.

In one, Hasson claims that he was stabbed while breaking up a fight:

In another, he is stabbed for no reason whatsoever; his companions do not even realize the stabbing has occurred until the suspects have passed:

Although another witness mentions seeing one of the suspects rise up off the ground:

In the end — even though Anton Herrold had at one point reportedly claimed not have carried a knife at all:

–and even though he had previously been reported to be “wicked” —

— in the trial, he was found not guilty due to self-defense. The jury took only thirteen minutes to arrive at the verdict. The article mentions that at the trial he was shown to be of good character; reading between the lines, I have to wonder if the implication is that Hasson, for his part, was not considered to be of good character.

Despite the not guilty verdict, Herrold soon returned to Europe, where his family has remained since. 

 

 

 

“The stabbing was done by a third party”

(Post 3 of 4)

The Allentown Leader of April 30, 1896, suggests that things are looking up for the murder defense of Anton Herrold (see previous two posts):

-Herrold and also his co-defendant, Tony Horwath, have the support of their wives and also a family friend, Henry Weisenberger

-Herrold has savings of $597 with which to fund his defense; a quick internet search shows average annual wages at the time to be around $500 or less, so this was roughly over a year’s pay

-The families were able to  hire two attorneys

The article does still refer to them as “Huns.” They claim that neither of them had a knife, and someone else entirely stabbed Hasson. 

Next: A quick jury verdict at the trial. 

 

 

Huns! Hikes! Drunken Hungarians!

(Post two of four)

At the end of the previous post about the killing committed by Anton Herrold in 1896, a newspaper labels Herrold and his companion “Hikes.” This term appears on the Wikipedia entry “List of Ethnic Slurs” as a reference to Italians; here it obviously has a different meaning.

The Allentown Leader of April 24 refers to the men as Huns:

Hungarians are not Huns; not much is really known about the Huns, who were made famous by Attila of course. Their language is lost, for one thing. The real ancestors of today’s Hungarians moved into what is now Hungary hundreds of years after the Huns had vanished from history.

The term Huns was famously used during World War One by the British and by Americans to refer to Germans:

In researching these posts I’ve learned that Kaiser Wilhelm II, ironically, may have inspired the use of this slur against his own people when he encouraged them to be as oppressive as Huns during the Boxer Rebellion in China in 1900.

Anyway, the coverage of Herrold (whose name was spelled several different ways in the various news articles) ended up being more polite, as we’ll see . . . 

.

So my friend’s great-grandfather stabbed a guy to death . . .

(Post one of four)

In Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, in April 1896, a young man named Anton Herrold — an immigrant from Hungary (he had ethnic German roots, hence the not-very-Hungarian-sounding name) — stabbed another young man, who died within a few days. The incident was covered heavily by local newspapers, although the details of the stories varied enormously. Herrold was the great-grandfather of a friend of mine, who sent me the clippings. 

The Semi-Weekly New Era of Lancaster Pa. described the stabbing as an “unprovoked” attack in which a “drunken Hungarian” “pounced” on the victim, John Hasson, in a “dark alley way” with a butcher knife: 

The Allentown Leader, however, wrote that the stabbing happened not as pouncing in a dark alley but rather after Herrold and one companion crossed paths with Hasson and two of his companions, and the men “jostled” each other:

These articles are so fascinating in how they reflect the standards of journalism of the time; had Hasson not been considered “respectable,” would the writer have mentioned this? This version also has the first ethnic epithet, “Hikes” — more of those to come!