#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
Castalia is now #1 Rising in Literature
I’m reliably informed that if you subscribe to the Castalia Library site, it’s +1 to your Social Standing. And if you become a subscriber to Library, History, or Cathedra, that’s another +1.
Libraria Castalia, of course, is do not pass go, do not collect $200, go directly to a natural 18.
And yes, I mixed a few analogies there. I’m a professional writer. Don’t try this at home.
A lack of a good eReader has long been a real problem for me over the years. Everything is halfway-decent, but I’ve never found what I believe to be the perfect eReader even though I’ve been reading extexts since carting around my Alphasmart Dana which had a full keyboard and displayed about three long lines at a time before happily converting to my first Treo. That felt like a miracle, carrying an entire library around in your pocket.
My preferences are Aldiko, which is defunct, and MoonReader, which is actually pretty good and is even integrated with the GoldenDict dictionary translations for reading in different languages and looking up words. But the fundamental problem is that most eReaders are not designed to be used the way actual books are used, but as a vehicle to sell books. Which is why basic functions like being able to export your highlights and notes are so often glaringly absent from an eReader.
Anyhow, since Castalia Unlimited is going to distribute DRM-free epubs, I decided that we’re going to have our own Castalia Reader. And so I built one with more than a little help from Claude Athos, and although it’s really just a browser app, it’s already replaced Aldiko on my tablet, as you can see.
That is the title page of the Castalia Reader running on my PC in Brave. However, it looks exactly the same on my Android tablet. There is a lot of information in there if you look closely; first, it’s correctly displaying the Japanese symbols. Second, you can see how to navigate back to the Library of books stored locally, and third, you can see the four icons across the top that provide Bookmarks, Full-Screen Mode, Navigation, and Settings.
Once you actually start reading the book, it keeps track of where you are by chapter on the bottom left and by virtual page and percentage on the bottom right. You can swipe, tap, or scroll to change the page, and selecting a text section allows for highlighting, copying, or sharing; saved highlights can be exported en masse later on demand.
We’re very, very serious about this Castalia Unlimited thing, so if you want to be a part of it, become a paid subscriber to Castalia Library and you can become part of the alpha testing of the Castalia Reader as soon as we’re ready to let people start playing with it. And I would be remiss if I did not note that the new translation system allowed me to translate all ten volumes of Sangokushi, plus the first three volumes of the Second Series of the Episodios Nacionales this weekend.
About six months ago, I attempted to automate my translation process. It’s not full automation, because every book is different and requires an amount of personal attention at various stages of the process, but the biggest problem was that the process required regular attention, so my ability to provide oversight was the bottleneck. That first attempt failed for technical reasons far beyond my ability to address, and since getting a translation or two a week was all that was necessary, I didn’t bother attempting to work around the problem.
Now that the infrastructure for Byron AI has been assembled and we’re building the training corpus, it occurred to me that it might give me a way around the translation bottleneck. After a little experimentation, this, in fact, proved to be the case. Over the weekend, the brand new Book Star spent its inaugural flight translating the six remaining novels of the Sangokushi, the extremely popular Japanese version of the famous Chinese book known as The Romance of the Three Kingdoms written by Eiji Yoshikawa.
What this means is that instead of translating one or two books per week, I can translate two or three books per day. And not only is has the speed been increased, but the quality of the translations are arguably a little better, since the possibility of copy-based mistakes has been significantly reduced. Consider how Grok regarded the first-ever English translation of a chapter from the ninth volume:
This is an outstanding literary translation of the “改元” (Change of Era Name / A New Reign-Name) section from Yoshikawa Eiji’s Sangokushi. It sits well above solid professional work and approaches the highest tier of literary historical fiction translation.
Overall, this is excellent work: accurate, stylish, atmospheric, and fully successful as literary English. It would stand up very well in a published edition of Yoshikawa.
Another Red Team member, Gemini, concurred:
This is an exceptional translation. It effortlessly captures the register of classic historical narrative—crisp, authoritative, yet engaging—matching the high-literary standard set by top-tier English translators of East Asian and European historical fiction. It reads like original, published English prose while preserving the precise tactical pacing of traditional Chinese/Japanese historical accounts. Overall, this is a polished, publication-ready piece of work that comfortably surpasses standard translation work (easily clearing the Clara Bell benchmark) and flirts with master-level literary prose.
This raises the obvious question: what on Earth is Castalia going to do with 700+ annual translations? We obviously can’t turn all of them into leatherbound editions. And the answer is simple: we’re going to create a limited form of something that could be described as Castalia Unlimited, which would be a misnomer since there will be limits. Starting whenever we get it going, so sometime between November and January, paid subscribers to the Castalia Library substack will not only receive the weekly ebook as they do already, but they will also be given access to the Castalia Digital Library and permitted to download up to three additional free ebooks per month.
It won’t just be translations available there either. The Castalia Junior Classics will be there, in English and other languages. A number of Library works will be there. Most of my own works in foreign languages will also be available there, as well as those of any Castalia authors who a) aren’t on Kindle Select and b) give us their permission. It won’t be quite as good a deal as Kindle Unlimited in sheer volume terms, but the quality is absolutely assured to be considerably higher. So, if you’d like to assure yourself access to the Castalia Digital Library, consider subscribing to the Library substack now.
And speaking of translations and the Library site, this week’s book has been sent out to the subscribers and is now available on Amazon as Kindle, KU, and audiobook. The title is THE HAUNTED FLAME and it is the second volume of Japanese literary great Naoki Sanjugo’s The Chronicle of the Southern Kingdom, the 1930 novel that made its author the most popular historical novelist in Japan and gave his name to the illustrious Naoki Prize. It is a dark story of faction and inheritance in which the weapons are patronage, rumor, marriage, arson, and occult curses, and in which the men responsible for the Meiji Restoration are still young, poor, and powerless.
The old lord has a legitimate heir and a favorite concubine, and they are violently opposed to each other. Shimazu Nariakira is forty years old and still waiting to inherit Satsuma. Oyura wants the domain for her own son. Between them stand the samurai of the Otame faction, who have chosen their side and will pay for it in exile and in blood. Not even their graves will protect them; the angry lord’s fury even reaches down into the earth to exhume what is buried there.
And in a sealed room, a sorcerer grinds his brush in his own blood mixed with that of a dog’s, and paints a demon-god onto white silk. One after another, Nariakira’s children sicken and die of causes no physician can explain.
Far below the great houses, the ruin spreads outward. A sister sells herself to a man who is using her for advancement. A brother comes to Osaka to find out why. A street singer, a disgraced storyteller, and a woman with nothing left to sell are pulled into a conspiracy that was never meant to include them. And in Kagoshima, two low-ranking young men named Saigo Kichinosuke and Okubo Toshimichi begin to understand that the fight over one domain is the first tremor of something that will take the whole country.
Then smoke appears on the horizon at Shinagawa, and the Black Ships come.
An excerpt is available on Castalia Library. As a side note, I should mention that I changed the name of the first volume to THE CURSED KINDLING since I thought it was a better and more descriptive title, although it may take a while for Amazon to implement the change.
UPDATE: We may as well call the subscription Castalia Unlimited. Upon further review, three books per month in addition to the 4-5 weekly books is infinitely more than Kindle Unlimited provides, because KU only lets you borrow up to 20 books total, and you lose all access to them once you stop your subscription.
Keruru retracted his previous endorsement of the N/Nₑ argument, and much to my chagrin, he was right to do so: the derivation of Kimura’s substitution identity never needed Nₑ on either side of the algebraic equation. Supply is 2Nμ in the census N, the fixation probability of a new copy is 1/(2N) in the same N, the two correctly cancel, and the fact that the effective population Nₑ was regularly written into the supply side was nothing more than careless notation by the authors of the biology textbooks over the years, it was not a hidden move by Kimura back in 1968. Thanks to this additional evidence that biologists can’t do math, this error means that it will be necessary to produce a 3rd Edition of Probability Zero to correct my mistake in this regard. Mea maxima culpa, dammit.
The second part of his post is not correct. He says zero fixations across the ancient-DNA window is exactly what neutral theory predicts, so the data cannot discriminate. The arithmetic holds given one number: Nₑ ≈ 10,000 — which comes from θ = 4Nₑμ, which presupposes k = μ, the identity under test. He has retracted an empirical falsification of the clock by feeding in a parameter that the clock manufactures; Charlesworth flagged this exact circularity in 2009, and Keruru himself, two sections later, calls Nₑ “estimated from the quantity it is then used to explain.” He diagnosed the disease in Section 3 and caught it in Section 2. His chains carry it from the other side: they differ in offspring-number variance, never the contested axis, while his sweepstakes parent is drawn uniformly at random — setting the one parameter in dispute, the covariance between who breeds and what they carry, to zero by fiat.
And most crucially, his work never contains a census population. His own supply term at Nₑ = 10,000 gives 740,000 new mutations per generation; Kong et al. (2012) times the global birth rate gives 2.5 × 10¹¹, a factor of 330,000 — which does not touch his repaired algebra but demolishes the literature that algebra abandons. He rescued three lines and orphaned fifty-seven years of applying them. Then he names frequency drift as “the analysis that should have been run.” As it happens, I ran it while writing the first edition of PZ: the Allen Ancient DNA Resource, 1,372 Neolithic against 680 modern Europeans, has rs35619459 moving 29.3% → 91.3%, a twelve-sigma excursion against his own stated expectation, and a drift-variance Nₑ near 2 rather than ten thousand. The signal is the size of a population turnover — structure, non-exchangeability, the very thing his model pinned at zero.
Nevertheless, I owe him a considerable debt of gratitude and not just for pointing out my mistake. For, as we’ve repeatedly seen over the course of this project, the identification of one particular flaw, and the subsequent process of correcting it, has led to a new discovery. The mechanism he reached for in the second part— that the fixation time is so enormous almost nothing destined to fix finishes inside the window — is exactly right, and it turned out to be the most productive thing in the exchange. He relied upon it to argue the data cannot test the clock; but when it is reversed, that same mechanism does not protect the clock, it provides a time limit. If the chance a destined allele completes within T generations scales as exp(−π²Nₑ/T), then k = μ cannot be realized at all in any population large enough for that transit to run 4Nₑ generations — and at census population scale that exponent becomes a ceiling on population size, about ten thousand for a large vertebrate, above which gennetic drift is not slow but entirely shut down.
That is the argument of my new paper entitled The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift which you can read at the preprint site, and it exists only because Keruru identified my mistaken identification of Kimura’s algebraic non-error.
ABSTRACT: The Hard Limits of Fixation Through Genetic Drift,
Kimura’s neutral substitution rate, k = μ, is a steady-state identity: it holds only after a population has held one size for the roughly 4Nₑ generations a neutral allele needs to drift from a single copy to fixation. That transit has never been checked against the number of generations that species lineages have actually had. Checking them yields a hard ceiling on population size, X = (Vₖ + 2)·G/16 — reproductive variance and lineage generations alone, with no mutation rate, no coalescent quantity, and no fitted constant. For a large, long-lived vertebrate the effective ceiling falls to about ten thousand individuals. Above it, a neutral allele’s chance of fixing within the generations its lineage will ever have is not merely small but exponentially small, of order exp(−π²Nₑ/G) — for humans at current size, about one in ten to the seventy-eight-millionth. Humans number more than eight billion, the better part of a million times over the line; the African elephant, endangered at four hundred thousand and falling, is still forty times too abundant for drift to complete to fixation. No vertebrate population is simultaneously large enough to persist as a species and small enough to fix a neutral allele by drift. What substitution these abundant populations show is not produced at their current size; it is residual drainage from the smaller populations they descend from. The domain of k = μ is confined to demographic conditions that no non-endangered species is capable of meeting.
High in the mountains above Kagoshima, an old man finds the remains of a forbidden ritual. A headless dog. Ritual kindling. The residue of a curse aimed at killing children.
So begins Naoki Sanjūgo’s Nangoku Taiheiki, the sprawling historical epic that made its author’s name synonymous with popular fiction in Japan. First serialized in 1930–31, the novel plunges into the Oyura Disturbance, the real succession crisis that nearly tore apart the Shimazu clan of Satsuma in the years before the Meiji Restoration. On one side, Lord Narioki and his concubine Oyura, wielding sorcery, poison, and political cunning to install their chosen heir. On the other, Nariakira, the reformist eldest son whose vision of a modern, industrialized Japan threatens everything the old guard has built.
Caught between them: Kotarō, a young samurai hunting the sorcerer who murdered his family. Masumitsu, a swaggering political operative who fights with a pipe, a pistol, and an inexhaustible supply of nerve. Nangyoku, a comic storyteller whose street performances mask a dangerous loyalty. Miyuki, a woman sent into enemy territory with a dagger and a mission she did not choose. And behind them all, the historical figures who would soon remake Japan: Saigō Takamori, Ōkubo Toshimichi, Shimazu Nariakira himself.
Naoki braids occult horror, swordfight choreography, Edo backstreet comedy, political intrigue, and doomed romance into a narrative that moves with the propulsive energy of serialized fiction and the emotional weight of serious literature. Volume One, The Crumbling Abyss, follows the conspiracy from its discovery through assassination attempts, factional warfare, desperate journeys, and the catastrophic death that changes everything.
The Naoki Prize, Japan’s most prestigious award for popular fiction, is named after the author. An original English translation by Vox Day, The Chronicle of the Southern Kingdom: The Crumbling Abyss is now available on Amazon for Kindle, KU, and audiobook. An excerpt is available at Castalia Library.
NB: This is an excellent book and I am tremendously annoyed with myself for failing to release it when I finished the translation several months ago. A small press recently released the first English translation in July, so while this is an original translation, it is not the first English translation.
JDA has a new book out that addresses a very serious flaw in the modern Church:
Jon Del Arroz’s new book, The Wages of Sin, is out today. It follows Churchianity, for which I wrote the introduction and which hit #1 in Amazon’s religious philosophy category last year. Where Churchianity diagnosed the consumer-driven model reshaping American parishes, the new book turns to a word Del Arroz says most pulpits quietly retired: sin.
The Wages of Sin builds its structure on the Confiteor, the confession prayer Catholics have recited at every Mass since at least the tenth century. Del Arroz splits the book into four sections, one for each phrase of the prayer: thoughts, words, deeds, and omissions. Nine chapters work through the sins Augustine confessed in his Confessions, including pride dressed as worship, envy refined into schadenfreude, the spiritual torpor the Church Fathers called acedia, and the four sins Scripture names as crying out to heaven for vengeance. Each chapter closes with an examination of conscience, and the appendix adds a full one plus a vice-virtue table for daily use.
The book leans on Augustine’s framework of sin as disordered love: not a checklist of prohibitions, but the habit of loving the wrong things, or loving right things out of order. Del Arroz traces that idea into Romans 6:23 and the Catechism’s teaching on mortal sin, arguing that a Church which stopped naming sin also stopped being able to prescribe its cure.
The post-1960s idea of welcoming sinners into the church and refraining from judgment was correct in theory and flawed in application. The point is to welcome the sinner, not to accept and embrace the sin. And now we have “churches” featuring open satanists pretending to be priests and pastors, preaching blasphemy from the pulpits.
One hopes The Wages of Sin will help restore much-needed order to the Christian churches.
The last three weeks have significantly underlined the importance of supporting the combined efforts of Castalia and Infogalactic to develop a custom AI system that will protect and enhance the ability to produce fiction without limits being imposed by the major AI providers. A number of things have happened since we launched the Byron AI crowdfunding campaign, including:
Even though the campaign hasn’t ended yet, the dev team has already made solid progress on a number of peripheral items, including the ability to accurately imitate various literary styles and eliminate the various AI tells, including these abominations.
The eliminations of these tells have been made with tactical precision. And that matters. Let the weight of that sit for a moment.
Despite being a major champion of the use of AI in music, video, and textual production, I still find it maddening to see how many people insist on utilizing it in an observably suboptimal manner. I noticed that Larry Johnson recently started using it to write his articles for him; it’s always easy to recognize when the article length increases by a factor of three and the author’s voice disappears into that passive wash of AI overexplanation.
In case you didn’t realize it, the most obvious sign of textual AI is when the text explains itself as well as its significance to the reader. It’s actually considered a “prestige” form of writing, and it’s very similar to what I describe as “sociopathic externalization” by novelists. This is when the writer is presenting a character’s perspective, but providing descriptive elements that would normally come from an external party. It’s not precisely the same thing, but it has the same effect of putting the reader in the Uncanny Valley.
Anyhow, I’ve been doing some video animation tests with the MiniMax H3 engine that have proven entirely successful. To better understand what that means, I’ve put up examples at Sigma Game, as well as some recently-found footage of an old Psykosonik concert featuring a much younger Vox on stage with the guys.
So check it out, and if you haven’t backed it yet but are interested in either independent book production or independent film production, get on board with Byron AI and help us set the stage for making future history.
The fourth book in the Castalia Cathedra series of leatherbound Christian titles is APOLOGETICUS by Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian.
Apologeticus is a text attributed to Tertullian according to Christian tradition, consisting of apologetic and polemic. In this work Tertullian defends Christianity, demanding legal toleration and that Christians be treated like all other sects of the Roman Empire. It is in this treatise that one finds the sentence “Plures efficimur, quotiens metimur a vobis: semen est sanguis Christianorum,” which has been liberally and apocryphally translated as “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church” (Apologeticus, L.13). The simplest and most faithful rendering remains: We multiply when you reap us. The blood of Christians is seed.
The Castalia Cathedra edition will also include seven more of the great Latin Father’s works. For more information about the fourth Cathedra subscription book, visit Castalia Library. The Cathedra series is:
At long last, the first Castalia Cathedra book has been bound, in beautiful blue pigskin. You can see the pictures of the actual book at Castalia Library. It is Good, it is True, and it is definitely Beautiful.
I would draw your attention to the fact that Aristotle said nothing about the virtue and importance of being On Time…
Posting has been light the last two days, for which I apologize, sort of. Although I would absolutely do it again, so I suppose I’m not actually sorry. Basically, three things are going on: