About these Notes

In keeping with their parent book, these Notes were a labor of love: I compiled and built them myself using Material for MKdocs and various other tools. You can see the code in my GitHub repo. Providing live links was painstaking but worth the effort, I hope, because there's a lot in Devil and now anyone who wants to explore a particular topic in more detail can do so easily. My fondest wish is that this becomes a live resource for readers and nonreaders alike; a cloud of useful information.

The serious purpose of this page is to set out the rules for accepting sources as valid. Anything given as a fact and not completely obvious needs to have had three reputable, reliable, fact-checked sources. To avoid bloat, I usually provide the one I like best—but do on occasion, where merited, supply more. In the few cases where I haven't given a source, it's likely to mean I've checked a subject's Wikipedia page and/or search engine results and found them to be good. These instances are rare.

Apart from being a log of sources, these Notes also include anecdotes, stories, quotes and thoughts I couldn't include in the main text without disrupting the flow. You'll find that both (notes and sources) are distributed unevenly, as required. So where the notes for early chapters may be relatively sparse, those for deeper ones from 5 onwards can be extensive. I've also included some code from the book, just because it looks so much better in its natural habitat, in color, online. I hope to enable the code to be be run, using PyScript, in due course (watch this space.)

Lastly, while an enormous effort has been made to ensure these pages are accurate and entertaining and that everything works as it should, I know from experience that the Edit Gremlins are cunning, so glitches can sneak in despite our best efforts. Readers finding any such quirks (or "quarks" for anyone who's read chapter 15) can flag them via devil-notes@andrewsmithauthor.com. The Edit Gremlins' close cousins the Time Snarks dictate that replying directly by email will probably be impossible, but please know that, whether a suggestion ends up being incorporated or not, constructive contributions have my sincerest thanks and respect. Mastodon and X are where these thanks are most likely to be posted. — asx, August 2024