I debated whether I should do a reflections post for season two at all. Since I started doing the release posts, most of the ground that I would cover in such a post is covered in those, instead, and I don’t want to be redundant. While Blood Magic is a major part of IGC Publishing at this point, making up the bulk of its content, I still want to be able to appeal to and attract readers who may not be interested in that particular series. However, I found after I finished the season two finale that I had enough to say about the season as a whole to make this post worth writing. Plus, I try to keep from putting spoilers to the events of the episode in the release posts, so consider this you spoiler warning: I do not intend to be so careful here.
Blood Magic S2:E3: Strange Lands Re-Release
My main goal, going through revisions having now completed the Pifechan invasion episodes at the end of season two, was to help readers understand the Pifechan mindset, and to make them seem less like a tropy evil empire out to dominate the world.
Weekly Writing Update
I'm back with the second weekly writing update. It remains to be seen if writing these will really motivate me to write consistently and within one project so that I have something to write about when I get to the end of the week.
Communicating Uncertainty
In a few months, when my review for Bernoulli's Fallacy goes live, we'll have a lot more to talk about when it comes to uncertainty, probability, and statistics. In the meantime, I wanted to share an article with you from the journal Science Advances, entitled "Earning the Public's Trust."
Child of Light Review
new and non-Shannara, I was therefore skeptical, but intrigued. Perhaps the only notable non-Shannara works he has published are The Magic Kingdom of Landover series, which I thoroughly enjoyed. It was my hope that Child of Light would tap into whatever had enabled Landover. Unfortunately, my hopes were misplaced, and Child of Light proved to be anything but fresh.
Fewer Words, Longer Books
rigorous, quantitative analyses to confirm the trend, so what I really have is a suspicion based on inference, internal logic, and anecdotal evidence; however, it struck me as a sufficiently interesting observation that I should desire to share it with you. The trend is this: the English language is losing words (ironic, considering our post about word creation), and is using more of them to compensate.
Weekly Writing Update
Welcome to our first weekly writing update! At least, the intention is for these to be weekly, and I will do my best to stick to that, even if some weeks it might be a post that doesn't have a lot to say.
Origins of Language Article
This is just a quick post to share an article across which I recently came. It was published in the Wall Street Journal, and since we often discuss linguistics in our posts it seemed worth sharing.
Forsaken Kingdom Review
Some books under-promise and over-deliver. Swordspoint, which we reviewed last week, is like that. The summary was enough for me to read it, but I didn’t expect anything remarkable; it proved to be one of the best fantasy books I’ve read this year. Forsaken Kingdom’s cover blurb was, unfortunately, the opposite. While the book wasn’t exactly bad, the main emotion I experienced while reading it was boredom. This coming from the man who recently read Human Dimension and Interior Space from cover to cover, and found it interesting.
Conservation and Cycles
In any closed system, quantities must be conserved. Thermodynamics inform us that energy is conserved. Linear and angular momentum are both conserved, whether we’re looking at billiard balls in a Newtonian paradigm, or photons in a quantum system. Special relativity expands conservation even further to the equivalence between matter and energy. In a closed system, where nothing can escape, quantities are inevitably conserved.
