I read it sometime around 2010, it involved a young man, possibly a teenager that fought using a spear, and at some point the modern world was taken over by demons, and the nations of the world negotiated with the demons to survive. He fought as a gladiator in an arena filled with demons. It was part of a series, and for some reason I keep thinking of the spear of Cucuhlainn.
I think this was more of a fantasy series, though it was more subtle than The Lord of the Rings IIRC. Set in modern times - though there was some alternate realm thing that was less modern I think.   I read it about ten years ago, I think, and there were a number of books at that time. My brother and I stopped reading it shortly after the main character summoned a small demon somehow who was a bad influence... I think.  It involved a boy who somehow was at some kind of training school/academy. Unsure where it was located, but it needed a classic portal to get to it I think. I clearly remember some scene involving a car driving at specific speeds to get past some barriers. There may have been something about how the school was (slowly) moving or the wards were shrinking... unsure. I don't think it was only magic based, but that was some element of it. The boy had some kind of strange power that made him an incredible fighter, but he wasn't sure how (at least from what I remember). The recordings of him training just showed a white flash I think. I remember some scene in an elevator going down to the training floor where he went to a level below some adult with him.  There was something else about him joining a group that had twelve members, one for each month, whose powers grew and lessened based on how close the date was to "their" month.  Oh, and there was something about him looking for his mother I think? Perhaps in another "realm"?   Any help is appreciated!
Example (note the case):  string s = "Hello world!"; String s = "Hello world!";   What are the guidelines for the use of each? And what are the differences? Why didn't Thanos come to Earth to retrieve Tesseract by himself? In the Avengers movie, why didn't Thanos personally come to Earth instead of Loki? Or, if Loki's skills were required, why didn't he come with Chitauri? He knew that humans were primitive; there wouldn't be any threat and he could personally secure Tesseract.  AFAIK, the movie didn't display much. Is there any other source answering this? Rules for forming demonyms Are there specific rules / conventions at play when creating demonyms? Or are they merely formed organically over time - the most popular winning out?  There are many suffixes to choose from, but I cannot find concrete guidelines as to which is proper to use in which instance. Java - How to reduce the size of third-party jars to reduce the size of your application Why linear and logistic regression coefficients cannot be estimated using same method? I read in a machine learning book that parameters of linear regression can be estimated (among other methods) by gradient descent, while parameters of logistic regression are usually estimated by maximum likelihood estimation.  Is it possible to explain to a novice (me) why we need different methods for linear/logistic regression. a.k.a why not MLE for linear regression and why not gradient descent for logistic regression? What are the different endings in Dishonored? In Dishonored the game as I am escaping the prison, I got a prompt that warned me:      Using stealth and nonlethal approach has benefits. Fewer rats and   weepers, some people react favorably, and the final outcome is not as   dark.   What are all the different endings? And how much chaos yields them? And what is the optimal ending? How can Innodb ibdata1 file grows by 5X even with innodb_file_per_table set? I have innodb_file_per_table set and just today my ibdata1 file jumped from 59M to 323M after I made several changes to an 800M table to reduce it to about 600M. That particular table's .ibd file was reduced but the server's ibdata1 file went crazy. Any ideas? What is the proper way to change the DNS IP? Matching a sentence with grep Cloning a Non-Standard Svn Repository with Git-Svn How can I tell if an ETF is expensive? For stocks, I can easily look at the price/earnings ratio, and, according to The Intelligent Investor, stand clear of those with a ratio higher than 20.  How can I tell if the current price of an ETF is a good price to buy it? Are there such simple metrics? Will Winterbash promote mass spamming due to its short time frame? Is there any concern that , due to their time-limited nature, will encourage mass spamming of posts? Cosmopolitan, for example, can only be achieved by posting to Meta. There are over one million users on Stack Overflow who may want this hat, and have only until January 4th to get it, and their only means of doing so is to invent some reason to post to Meta. A hard problem on exponential integration Suppose $a : [0 , 1] \to \Bbb R$ is an infinitely smooth function. For $\lambda\ge1$, define $$F(\lambda) := \lambda \int_0^1 e^{\lambda t} a(t) \, dt.$$ If $\sup_{\lambda\ge1}|F(\lambda)|\lt\infty$, then $a$ is the identically zero function. Below are the some results I have derived:   Derivatives of any order of $a$ vanishes at $t = 1.$ For any $\delta\lt1$, $a(t)$ has a zero in the open interval $(\delta , 1).$  The same is true for all the derivatives of $a(t)$. This tells us that the $n^\text{th}$ derivative of $a$ has infinitely many distinct zeros for all natural $n$. If $a$ is analytic, then I can show that $a(t)\equiv 0.$ If $a(t)\ge0$ on $[0 , 1]$, then it is obvious that $a\equiv 0.$   I would appreciate any hint.  Actually $(1)$ and $(3)$ follows from $(2)$. For $(2)$, suppose that $a(1)\gt0$ (the case that $a(1)\lt0$ can be argued in the same way as the following), then there exists $\delta\lt1$ such that $a(t)$ is strictly positive on $I = [1-\delta , 1]$. Then write $F(\lambda) = \lambda\int_0^{1-\delta}e^{\lambda t}a(t)dt + \lambda\int_{1-\delta}^1e^{\lambda t}a(t)dt$. Now there exists $c\gt0$ such that $a(t)&gt;c$ on $I$ since $I$ is compact, so that the second term is bounded below by $c (e^{\lambda}-e^{\lambda(1-\delta)})$. But the first term is only $O(e^{\lambda(1-\delta)})$, so this contradicts the fact that $F(\lambda)$ is bounded. Morever, using the same idea and integration by parts, one can see that $n^{th}$ derivative of $a$ must vanish at $1$. Mute conversations on Skype I'm in a conversation and I don't really want to leave because the people there keep adding me back so it's just whatever. But I would like to mute the conversation or something like I do on Facebook so I won't take notifications or anything from there unless I press on the group and see what's going on. Because for now I have my Skype having a new notifications every half a second.  Any solutions to that? Ubuntu boots on terminal only, how do I recover the GUI desktop? How to properly Drape vectors over a DEM? Induction problem: "if the group has at least one player who is better than Messi, then all the members of the group are better than Messi" Do you want to come with? Can I come with?  I seem to hear this construction more often in recent years, but it still grates on my ear. I know it's often said that one shouldn't , but I class that rule along with  (i.e. — pedantic tosh). Is it always informal/casual speech to end a sentence with &quot;with&quot;? Was it ever thus? Can we continue to show the "Take a tour" banner after a user has created an account? When you view a Stack Exchange site without being logged in, you see a friendly banner, prompting you to take a tour and understand the features of the site:    This links off to a high quality resource that can help new users understand how the site works. However, the moment a user signs up to the site, this banner disappears from immediate view and hides itself as a link under the help menu.  My proposal is to continue showing this banner until one of the following conditions are met;   The user gets the "Informed" badge The user reaches a set amount of reputation (250 or 500 should be sufficient) The user chooses to hide the banner   This should increase the exposure of the tour to new users, who are the people who need the tour, rather than hiding it the moment a user signs up. Why is $\langle \textbf R \rangle =Tr \rho R$ here $\rho$ is the state density matrix