Finished reading: A Parade of Horribles (Dungeon Crawler Carl) by Matt Dinniman 📚

I miss it already

I went from “this title is intriguing” to “I love this world” real fast. This is like the pastoral medieval counterpoint to Dungeon Crawler Carl.

It’s. just. fun.

I also highlighted a bunch…

from Demon Overlord’s Retirement Plan (A Gentle Apocalypse)

Ashur almost always opened with Holy Strike, not because it was tactically sound, but because paladins were creatures of rigid faith, and faith demanded certain rituals be observed.

Not the clean agony of a sword through the heart or the righteous burn of holy fire, this was the pain of existence itself being questioned.

It really didn’t matter what type of magic you wielded. What mattered was your intent.

Chaos never dies. It just changes shape into a bewildering number of forms. I’d once thought I had the monopoly on chaos, but village life had taught me otherwise.

My nemesis. Everyone needs one, it keeps the mind sharp.

Human “elites” were really just demons in human form.

I’d seen this pattern before. Humans lived, loved, then died. They were good at the first two but didn’t seem to accept the inevitability of the third.

(always summon under the new moon, the old moon has opinions)

I’d forgotten the cardinal rule of retirement: comfort is complacency’s prettier sister.

Supply and demand were as inevitable as gravity.

I was at the head of a tactically retreating army. Or what I liked to call “attacking in a homeward direction.”

Human currency was, after all, fictional, and accounting was terribly difficult to understand.

Evil’s greatest weakness was its inability to understand that power could come from something other than strength or fear.

from Love, Politics, and Other Acts of War

After all, if love truly surpasses all rules, then even the most rigid divine laws must bend to accommodate genuine change of heart.

Effective theater always went a lot farther than any sort of logical argument.

Style was what separated a real villain from the amateurs.

She’d understood that unpredictability was its own form of power.

there was always a pattern, even in chaos. Especially in chaos.

He wanted me to have an education beyond commerce. Said it would make me a better merchant to understand how people think, what they believe, what drives them.

she valued questions more than certainty.

You can never fight an opponent whilst risking your life and not weave them into your being.

Diplomacy through agriculture. The wonders that could be achieved on a farm were limitless apparently.

from Band of Others

Delegation was such a beautiful thing. I would kill two harpies with one fireball.

Being adored was such a burden.

Speculation and gossip were the true superpowers of humans.

Nobody won by enacting Armageddon-level events.

Today, he surfed the wave of annihilation with abandon.

Human language was so needlessly confusing. They could never just choose one word and stick with it.

They clung to their cultural identities and died for it with shocking willingness.

“The reason the hero wins despite being inferior is really quite simple,” I said, and Sally perked up. “The hero, whether they are from Pelan, Trumar, the Divine Order, or any one of the countless human nations, does not fight alone. The hero and their companions never accept the odds when they challenge the Demon Overlord. Together, they achieve their goals by fulfilling each of their roles."

The hero is just someone that tries enough times until they get lucky enough to succeed.

We all preferred having this spinning orb of dirt to stand on. Space provided far less amusement.

There was always an unending supply of humans willing to fight and die, so I assumed they’d sprung from the womb with a tendency towards violence.

Few beings truly understood their own heart.

He had spared no expense to explain loudly and flamboyantly through retail design that he was the foremost merchant power in the region.

Domination was for the weak. A true knight was self-reliant.

Kings and emperors did not gain power because they were easily satisfied. And they almost certainly never got close enough to a battle to experience it firsthand or consider the cost of blood.

If humans disseminated knowledge and scientific truth at the same rate they spread gossip, they would have entered a technological golden age long ago.

What was truth anyway except something to be disproven periodically in the name of advancement.

What was the difference between blessings and curses anyway but two sides of the same coin? It was all in the eye of the beholder.

After an eternity of existence, I was finally free to decorate for my dreams instead of designing to indicate my status.

Disorganized chaos was just that… disorganized and chaotic. You never quite knew what would happen. I liked my chaos neat and tidy.

Mortals were infinitely creative when it came to flights of fancy and ignoring facts that did not fit their desired outcomes.

The traitors had followed my order to the letter whilst simultaneously annihilating the spirit of my command.

We didn’t just occupy space together; we lived the same moments.

Mortals were obsessed with stories. And legacy.

Why bother wasting time on fame when you had such a limited lifespan?

There was no such thing as perfect morality; it was just an excuse to be static.

A collection of quotes on children

Children, I discovered, were essentially drunk adults overrun with adrenaline who hadn’t yet learned shame.

I’d learned that children required constant validation or their questions multiplied… or worse. They leaked water out of their eyes for no apparent reason.

Human children were like ducklings, and hardly more sophisticated.

She was fabricating a personal tradition as if it were law.

Discussing logic with children was like trying to scoop up fire. It was impossible.

Finished reading: Band of Others (A Gentle Apocalypse) by M. H. Foster 📚

Finished reading: Love, Politics, and Other Acts of War (A Gentle Apocalypse) by M. H. Foster 📚

Finished reading: Demon Overlord’s Retirement Plan (A Gentle Apocalypse) by M. H. Foster 📚

Finished reading: Ghosts of Greenglass House by Kate Milford 📚

My daughter and I continue to visit the Greenglass House universe. I may enjoy these more than she does.

Highlights

I think most people know they shouldn’t make bad assumptions about people, but they don’t always get that making any assumptions is probably not a good idea.

“Now maybe, if you can, try not to think about it anymore for a while. Because when you think about this kind of thing, you worry, and worrying just makes you feel worse."

But even the miraculous can fade into the background and become invisible when you can’t look past something that seems closer and more menacing.

back in the days before he learned that monsters lived in houses just like everyone else.

Maps don’t show reality, they give you a way of visualizing it.

“Every map focuses on some things and leaves other things out. Making a map means making choices about what’s important to you. What the world is really, truly like in every single detail doesn’t matter; what matters is what specifically about the world you want to show. Orientation’s part of that—it can help emphasize what information is significant. And you can orient a map however you want, as long anyone else who needs to read it can figure out how to orient it too.”

This is one where some kind of ritual will grow out of it for me.

“the days between either the twenty-first and the second day of the New Year or the twenty-fourth and the fifth of the New Year are the Raw Nights. They are uncertain nights, nights when it is said spirits and haunts come out to walk. But also they are oracle nights, augury nights, lot nights—nights when fortunes can be told, and good luck can be assured . . . or the opposite,” he added. “So the Waits venture out during

Finished reading: Blues Poems by Kevin Young 📚

One of the best parts of reading a poetry anthology is finding a new poet to explore more. Now it’s time to read more Yusef Komunyakaa.

Finished reading: Tokyo Ueno Station: A Novel by Yu Miri 📚

For a relatively short book, this took me quite a while to read. According to Libby I first checked it out October 1, 2021. Put it down, then tried again in October 2024. (Why October? It’s a ghost story of a sort. Spooky szn reading.) Now I’ve been chipping away since April.

While that makes it sound like it was a slog, I did enjoy reading it. Just a multiple time casualty of timing I suppose.

Passages I Highlighted

On Poverty & Homelessness

The wages of that sin were poverty, a wage that one could not endure, leading one to sin again, and as long as one could not pull oneself out of poverty, the cycle would repeat until death.

Nobody starts off life in a hovel made of cardboard and tarps, and nobody becomes homeless because they want to be. One thing happens, then another.

If you fall into a pit, you can climb out, but once you slip from a sheer cliff, you cannot step firmly into a new life again.

To be homeless is to be ignored when people walk past while still being in full view of everyone.

On Death

And he would be tomorrow, too. From now on he would always be dead.

because when someone dies, they’re returning to the Pure Land.
“Our people never worried whether a funeral would be on an auspicious day or an inauspicious one, because a funeral’s something to celebrate. And we don’t put a note on the house to warn people we’re in mourning, ‘cause death isn’t an impurity, which is why we don’t purify ourselves with salt after a funeral either.

The judgement as to what kinds of deaths are good or bad is entirely our own.

On Time

A box whose lid is sealed by time should not be opened. Were it opened, I would be plunged at once into the past.

Time does not pass.
Time never ends.

The calendar separates today from yesterday and tomorrow, but in life there is no distinguishing past, present, and future. We all have an enormity of time, too big for one person to deal with, and we live, and we die—

On Deciding & Adjusting

Returning home in a dream isn’t the same as returning home in real life.

The only thing I was guilty of was being unable to adjust. I could adapt to any kind of work; it was life itself that I could not adjust to. The pain of life, the sadness…and the joy…

A number of paths were now behind me.
Only one way was left before me.
Whether it was the way home or not, I wouldn’t know until I tried.

Aphoristic Phrases

Light does not illuminate.
It only looks for things to illuminate.

To speak is to stumble, to hesitate, to detour and hit dead ends. To listen is straightforward. You can always just listen.

but those who hear another’s secret are obliged to share one of their own. Secrets are not necessarily hidden things. Events that do not bear hiding become secrets when one chooses not to speak them.

On Rain

The rain now fell as if it were whispering softly to each of the passerby hiding their heads under their umbrellas.

The scent of rain was stronger just after it had stopped.

No how against this conversation
Of fingers and tongues, this
Rent party above the
Slaughter-house.

from Muddy Waters & the Chicago Blues by Cornelius Eady
inBlues Poems📚

Luxury, then, is a way of
being ignorant, comfortably
An approach to the open market
of least information. Where theories
can thrive, under heavy tarpaulins
without being cracked by ideas.

from Political Poem in Transbluesency by Amiri Baraka 📚