Project Update October 2026
By Rare Hydrogen
Since my last update.
I’ve been working my ass off trying to finish this Soft War Strikebreaker draft (#4), and there were some pretty intensive overhauls. I changed the name of the shadowy revolutionary group twice, changed a bunch of guard names, gave the handgun to a different person in the ending, figured out the exact distance in KM my factory planet is from Earth, and experimented with hundreds of different ways to describe ice and freezing, sloppy black mud.
BUT, importantly, there is an actual mech in the story now!!! HUZZAH!
Anyways, I am deeply annoyed that I have missed my original 10/1 deadline, and my follow-up 10/15 deadline. There’s a good chance I won’t make my next deadline either, 10/31, which sucks because I really wanted to release this during spooky season. It certainly isn’t a Christmas book. Oh well. Not much I can do about that now.
You may look at that glib list I wrote above and think, gee Rare, you didn’t really do a whole lot in September! You could have made your deadline if you’d worked harder. Buddy, are you ever wrong. If I had to guess, every single chapter has taken about three hours of editing, and I’m on ch. 12 of 13 at the moment. I’m almost there. I can taste the apple cider at the finish line… What I’m trying to say is that the rewrite has been substantial. I even added a chapter! Hopefully it’s all worth it in the end. I feel like I’m trying to chisel a sculpture out of granite with a toothbrush.
My new goal is to have the book released by 11/15
A brief personal note
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dharma lately. My day job is very unfulfilling, especially with AI-this and AI-that being shoved down our throats every day. There’s a secular understanding of Dharma that I’ve been contemplating: “the law that sustains things.”
Lately, I’ve been struggling to sustain myself. I’ve been searching for an order to the chaos of my existence. On one side of my brain are my fleeting goals and ambitions and aspirations, and on the other side, there is a mire of distraction that big tech has built for us all to swim and defecate in. We’re in a real pickle, right now. Everyone in the west walks around with these little time-and-happiness vampires in their pockets, and no one can put the damn things down.
I could weep if I knew how to cry anymore.
AI is everywhere and it sucks. But you already knew that.
I almost wrote an ‘AI Policy’ for this blog, Studio Mystery, where I tried to justify using AI for various things. But now that I’ve reviewed multiple AI-written software projects, I have completely changed my mind. To borrow a line from a friend; AI can write code, but it cannot produce software. Software requires human attention, understanding, expectation and ownership. At least when I look at two versions of a human-made repo, I don’t have to worry that the CODING LANGUAGE used to write the whole thing magically changed between commits. Maybe the big AI companies will fix this slop-factory product they’ve brought into the world in the future. Maybe they’ll refine it. I don’t know.
Using proprietary tools has always been a software turn-off for me. I want the most control over my tools and system, not the least. I don’t want to hand-off my decision-making to a computer, when I barely feel comfortable handing it off to another human being. WYSIWYG editors are terrible. If you want to build software, you should understand what you’re building well enough to actually build it yourself.
I’m going to re-write that AI policy at some point to be an ‘Anti-AI Policy’ and my sanity will be better for it.
Goals for October
- Finish Draft #4
- Make all the little ctrl-F changes
- Send it to the editor, ole whats-his-name