studiomcah
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Return of the Jokka!
planning
January 15, 2025

Running Peradventure has caused several of you to revisit the Jokka stories (and some of you to read them for the first time!), and that has led, inevitably, to questions about the missing stories… the ones that exist only as audio, or that were on retailers briefly and vanished. There are three of those, plus an unfinished fourth story, and an unfinished novella. It had always been my plan to issue a second (and probably final) collection to gather those stragglers into a format people could acquire, but I put it on a backburner for a lot of reasons, not least was that I heard consistently that the Jokka were some of people’s least favorite stories.

And then a surprising number of you came out of the woodwork to say that they’re among your favorite stories and could you please have the remainder and the new ones as well.

I find myself needing a breather from the Peltedverse; I have a habit of rushing endings, and this is an ending I definitely don’t want to rush. So a break is looking good, and “finish a handful of short stories” feels like low-hanging fruit. Especially since I apparently started a refresh of the Stone Moon novels, with modern formatting and typo fixes and art sections, that I never finished, back in 2023.

My thought—‘throw together a three-story collection and call it done’—has accordingly evolved into ‘run a kickstarter for the whole Jokka setting.’ What that would entail:

  • Issue new editions of the Stone Moon trilogy and Clays, with updated formatting, typo fixes, and new art sections (in color, for people buying direct!)

  • Edit the existing three stories for the collection, “Unknowable,” “Anadi Dolls” and “The Smell of Intelligence”; the latter, in particular, was cut terribly to try to fit within market lengths, and desperately needs to be expanded.

  • Fund, as stretch goals, the remaining stories: the unfinished post-Stone Moon Trilogy short (unnamed); a short sweet story; and as a final stretch goal, the unfinished novella about the founding of het Serelni (that would be the thing you longtimers have heard about as ‘red honey’).

Prizes for this one would be pretty good! Especially since all these stories are in audio… it would be one of the few campaigns I could run with all three formats, paper, ebook, and audio. (No hardcovers, though, that would be too timeconsuming.) There’s also a lot of art; I even have an existing sticker for the Jokka, and bookmark designs, and could probably brainstorm more things. “Me as my Jokkasona” would be an easy, fun high level prize, too, and I think the quiz for determining your Jokka sex is still on my hard drive somewhere. Someone could probably help me set that up on a website.

Also, I admit I want to take these stories back from the zeitgeist. I wrote them in good faith, and they’ve been used recently as ways to attack me, and that annoys me. Annoying Libras is difficult, but once we get poked enough, we wake up and go nuclear. XD

So this is what’s on my mind right now, and I post it both to organize it in my head and to give you fair warning that it might be coming!

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Alysha Misc

Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.

Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!

Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461

Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.

After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...

Alysha Misc
The Jaguar's Heart 7: We Are Not a Monolith

A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.


Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.

A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.

It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)

I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....

The Jaguar's Heart 7: We Are Not a Monolith
The Jaguar's Heart 6: Hatespeech

One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.


Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.

It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.

We have forgotten how to listen.

Increasingly, we have also ...

The Jaguar's Heart 6: Hatespeech
Madness! March 2025 Update

So frens, it is… let me check. It is March 22nd, and at this point, I am almost done with Ai-Naidari Conversations 3 (32K of 40K projected) and 22K into Kherishdar 5, which should be nearly halfway (I’m expecting 40-50K on that one). You will note I began KH5 about a month ago, and I somehow managed to fumble my way into a “you must avoid the keyboard frequently” arm injury so I’ve been working at massively reduced speed.

It feels very weird to me that I haven’t even formally released the gamelit… that’s next month! And I wasn’t even done writing the gamelit until February 17th! What a crazy amount of work I’ve done very suddenly. At the rate I’m going, KH5 will be done at the end of April/beginning of May! And Conversations 3 will be ready to go at the same time. Even though I’m planning to let this one sit for a month or so before editing it, because it really needs the time to rest—there is so much going on in it—that means we’ll still get a book release in ...

Back in Time Tuesday: Flight of the Godkin Griffin

From 2004, around the time of the original serialization of the book on Livejournal, here's an ink-and-marker portrait of the three leading ladies of the story: Angharad the griffin hybrid, Silfie the mostly fox, and od Ragna, the barbaric native pard.

Possibly my favorite odd detail of this one is that Angharad's shoulders look broad enough to make you think she made general in an army where you still have to stab things with sharp edges. XD

Anyway, I did finish that story up ages ago, and it's available as the two book sword-and-sorcery story, starting with Flight of the Godkin Griffin and winding up with The Godson's Triumph. You can grab it if you missed this one bundled in all three formats (ebook, audio, or paper): https://studiomcah.com/products/the-godkindred-ebook-bundle

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February 25, 2025
The Best Laid Plans of Chimerical Jaguars

I am supposed to be launching the Kickstarter for the second Jokka collection this week. In fact… my planned date for that was… yesterday.
You will note that I have not launched the Kickstarter. That would be because the Ai-Naidar showed up, and while they didn’t do anything as uncouth as punch me in the face, they’ve laid me out anyway, like a boxer down for the match. Most of you have noticed the eruption of meta-conversations on patrelocals, and probably knew before I did what this portended. But I’ve had occasional clusters of visits from the Ai-Naidar before without needing to write another story in the canon, and honestly I thought their next story was going to be written four years ago, and it didn’t happen. I have lots of notes, but no book.

Well, now I am two chapters into a book. Not a long one, I don’t think. And not the one I planned (of course). But I don’t think I’ve had an idea eat my brain this completely in years. I am once again so full up with Stuff that I am ...

February 02, 2024
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Gamelit Novel Index

The chapter titles are all a mess. But this is the proper order so far:

Gamelit 1 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4241337/gamelit-novel-first-chapter

Gamelit 2 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4255477/gamelit-novel-last-bit-of-chapter-1

Gamelit 3 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4267366/gamelit-novel-chp2-part1

Gamelit 4 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4267371/gamelit-novel-chp2-final

Gamelit 5 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4298755/gamelit-novel-chp-3-part-1

Gamelit 6 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4330428/gamelit-chp-3-part-2

Gamelit 7 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4331116/gamelit-chap-4-pt-1

Gamelit 8 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/4361942/gamelit-chp-4-last-bit

Gamelit 9 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5215305/gamelit-novel-chapter-3

Gamelit 10 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5244861/gamelit-novel-10

Gamelit 11 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5271216/gamelit-novel-11

Gamelit 12 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5301971/gamelit-novel-12

Gamelit 13 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5326625/gamelit-novel-13

Gamelit 14 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5360605/gamelit-novel-14

Gamelit 15 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5385714/gamelit-novel-15

Gamelit 16 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5418577/gamelit-novel-16

Gamelit 17 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5444360/gamelit-novel-17

Gamelit 18 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5475518/gamelit-novel-18

Gamelit 19 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5502726/gamelit-novel-19

Gamelit 20 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5530518/gamelit-novel-20

Gamelit 21 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5558728/gamelit-novel-21

Gamelit 22 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5586451/gamelit-novel-22

Gamelit 23 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5613544/gamelit-novel-23

Gamelit 24 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5642711/gamelit-24

Gamelit 25 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5668799/gamelit-25

Gamelit 26 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5693714/gamelit-26

Gamelit 27 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5722853/gamelit-27

Gamelit 28 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5747793/gamelit-28

Gamelit 29 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/5772301/gamelit-29

RECAP RECAP Gamelit 29.5 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6386873/gamelit-29-5

Gamelit 30 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6398055/gamelit-30

Gamelit 31 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6411958/gamelit-31

Gamelit 32 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6432688/gamelit-32

Gamelit 33 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6457957/gamelit-33

Gamelit 34 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6481325/gamelit-34

Gamelit 35 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6501493/gamelit-35

Gamelit 36 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6542961/gamelit-36

Gamelit 37 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6563733/gamelit-37

Gamelit 38 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6590629/gamelit-38

Gamelit 39 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6612520/gamelit-39

Gamelit 40 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6635635/gamelit-40

Gamelit 41 - https://studiomcah.locals.com/post/6662873/gamelit-41-potentials-potentialing

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Meta-Conversations: The Unexpected Calligrapher

“You are the calligrapher for this book!” I say, startled.

Kor pauses with my pen in his hand, and that bland expression is a form of teasing. “Shall I get Farren instead?”

“No, it’s fine, I just… didn’t expect it…!”

“I do write, you know.”

“Of course you do, you’re just…” What to say? “You’re a very busy man.”

He resumes work. “I could leave it to Tsevet—”

I don’t shudder, but it’s a near thing. I don’t want to think of what Tsevet would do with the task of illustrating the Conversations. “Definitely not.” I eye him. “You are having amusement at my expense, Kherishdar’s Shame.”

“Only a little, Kherishdar’s Scribe.” He resumes copying words. “I prefer pens to brushes. And I do write, you know. And enjoy the act of writing.”

“I know. You wouldn’t have found it so easy to undertake the rewriting of the Book of Corrections if you hadn’t.” I sit across from him and watch the pen move down the page. “This latest book is so easy to write, to also be so devastating. It would already be done if I hadn’t injured myself.”

His mmm is noncommittal.

“My injury has nothing to do with the book. I know it looks like overwork, but it’s not.”

He doesn’t lift his head, but he glances at me, just a flicker of the coronal eyes.

“I wish I was moving faster.”

I’m expecting to be chastised. Maybe I’m asking for it. He touches the nibs of two of the pens to bleed the colors together. “Qirini, go eat the ice cream.”

I suppress my sigh, because when one is old enough, Correction is as often subtle as it is direct. “Do Ai-Naidar have ice cream?”

“A confection of chilled cream, sweetened and flavored? What do you suppose?”

Put that way…

 

Matova – noun – ice cream; literally ‘sweet snow’.

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More AI Experiments: In Which the Jaguar Vibe-Codes

Coding an interface into my Ai-Naidari lexicon is my current side project… though can I call it a side project when my other two projects currently are the Ai-Naidari meta-conversations and a Kherishdar novel? It’s obviously all just swirled together in my brain. But I’ve always wanted some kind of standalone gamified language thingie for this setting and putting it together was beyond both my time constraints and my capabilities.

Except now there’s vibe coding.

For those of you who aren’t terminally online (like me), vibe coding is talking to AI about what you want and having AI code you the results. And… it works. Two days later, I have a minimally viable interface that searches my google spreadsheet and returns you words, teaches you a word of the day, and gives you a random word when you ask. Which is honestly magical. A thing I wanted done for years, just… like that. And my oh my, I have learned a lot.

One – I don’t know how well vibe coding works if you haven’t done some coding and/or sysadmin work in the past. I am by no means a coder; at best, I was good at patching together pieces of things written by other people, and I could construct a useful SQL query for a database most days, and I could figure out some very basic sysadmin tasks. I’ve also written some design documents, and read a bunch, and I have a functional knowledge of how software works at a high level. This means I am able to tell AI what I want (“I’d like the user to select between two drop down boxes, one of which will search for the user input in the ‘meaning’ column and one that will search in the ‘category’ column”).


It also means when something breaks and AI explains what it is, I have a basic idea of what it’s talking about and I know enough to know when something I’m doing is potentially dangerous. At least two problems we ran into, I figured out how to fix myself because I’d had sufficient prior experience with all this stuff to spot it before Grok did. (The most amusing one involved my text editor wrapping long lines, which ‘broke’ them by python standards.)

So I don’t know how well this would work if you’re starting from square one. But when you’re starting from a very rusty square 5, it’s interesting how fast you can blow the rust off and get moving.

Two – interestingly (to me), a lot of the errors I ran into were environmental. I spent all of Day 1 trying to figure out why python wasn’t working on my host, and Grok and I went through hours of trial and error before we pinned it down to a host permission error that I had to contact my hosting company to resolve. Nearly all of my problems weren’t code problems, they were interactions between the code and the environment, because I hadn’t set up the environment… my hosting provider had. So I didn’t know enough about it to guess at the issues until we brute-forced our way down a chain of tests.

Three – Grok and I went through literally hours of trial and error. I don’t think I can express how enormous that is. “This broke.” “Great, check here for error messages. What do you see?” “Here, this.” “Oh, that means xyz, let’s try this.” Over. And over. And over. And unlike a person, Grok never got tired of helping me, never got impatient or frustrated, never wandered off to do something else, and never ran out of ideas.

When I got my first day job, they wanted me to write web pages, which I could do. But they gave me a bare metal RAID and said ‘put some hard drives in this thing, install an OS on it, then install a web server and make the website' which... is like telling someone to make a cookie by showing you the field where they expect you to plant the wheat. If I hadn’t had very patient friends I could run to for advice, I would have failed right out the gate. And everything I ever learned, I learned either by painstakingly searching forums, reading out-of-date books, or asking people to teach me... in their spare time because they were all busy doing their own jobs. And how embarrassing and frustrating it was to have to constantly bother them for help…!

Imagine having AI as your always-on, always-ready teacher. I’m imagining me with that tool back then and how much faster and more effective I would have been. It’s mind-blowing.

Which brings me to four – I am learning a great deal. Some of the stuff we did I am only hazy on; the API business is still at the “just do what Grok says” stage for me. But a lot of the stuff I was hazy on before going into this experiment, I now see far more clearly. Things like data structure (in the  ‘okay, the way I have the data set up makes it difficult to use’ sense)… you learn that a lot faster when you try to access it than when you imagine how it’s going to be accessed. You also learn about UI a lot faster when you actually use trial versions of a UI than you do when poking other people’s, or designing a UI without testing a live version.

I can totally see vibe coding being a tool to become a better coder. IF (and only if!) you pay attention and ask it to explain things as you go.

Five – I wonder how many people realize how insanely complex all the backend systems are that power our consensus technological reality. It concerns me how opaque that stuff is. I hope lots and lots of people are learning how to maintain it or we’re going to be in trouble.

Finally… I’m having fun. I’m not going to say spending four or five hours iterating through error messages is everyone’s idea of fun, but there was something magical about the AI always having something new to try, always ready to tell me how to find a tool I wasn’t sure how to use and walk me through it, always encouraging me to keep going. And once my little talking-head interface was up and every change I made was testable live, it was just tremendous. To go from ‘this is an idea I’ve had in my head for years’ to ‘it works, now you just need to make it prettier and more robust’ is… insanely cool.

If you'd like to play with my alpha version interface, pop onto my discord. I'm limiting it for now because I only have 300 credits worth of API calls and I have a lot of testing and fixing I want to do before I run out of them! But I should be able to get this thing to the point where I can make it generally available, and by then I’ll have learned enough to do some other projects I’ve wanted to do, like a book recommendation game, and maybe a wiki interface and some other silly but fun things.

I keep finding use cases for AI that are honestly pretty amazing. Using it as an assistant for conlang was great for me... but this use case is great for my fans, or will be eventually, and I'm really excited about it.

For those of you who don’t care and mostly want to know about the setting stuff… I’m thinking the girl is from Elidzin, the Regal house that marries into Qevellen. But I’m still trying to decide who our hostess is. I should ask...!

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