Happy New Year!

The calendar has flipped.  And I belatedly wish that I would have sent this a couple days ago on the 123123 date if you're using the month-day-year format.  Oh well.

It's also time for a new season of something, in which I apply a yearly theme that Grey and Myke often discuss on the Cortex podcast.  Rather than stating a specific goal or resolution, you apply a broader theme or season.

It's a Season of Experimentation for me.

I've already been doing that for the last couple of months.  Some of it has been inflicted on me, as in the case of recent reorgs at the day job, which necessitates new ways of doing things, and new tasks as well.

And in my personal life with making the switch from Evernote to Joplin for my various recipe notes and media lists.  I also tried out a mustard marinade for turkey tenderloins when my wife and I hosted a holiday meal for the family.  Extra tasty.

I've also added a new phase to my drafts, using the WordTalk free extension to read back my text.  I have an older version of Word that doesn't have the built in read back, but WordTalk definitely does the trick.  I'll be using it for the new books and my back catalogue to help catch more typos and grammar errors.

I might go with something else for notes and read back tech.  Maybe something using AI with a voice that sounds less robotic.  We'll just have to see.

I'm experimenting after all.

Deva Falc once despised Nirva Iniv.  In the early days of the War of Reunification, the Arch Demon Baroness of Barithania led an army against the Palle Empire.  Before its ascendance gained momentum.  Had things gone differently, perhaps Deva might have claimed dominion over her own empire.  She held all manner of dark ambitions.

No more.

Nirva used the dark language of Hrolish to negate Deva's will.  She is now Nirva's dispassionately loyal bodyguard.  The enthralled baroness only wants what the Empress of Palle wants. 

That includes transforming her mind with an immaterial creature, giving her artificial psionics.  And perhaps even altering her body into something stronger, something worse.

Whenever it finally tatters her mind, no matter.  Nirva cares not, and neither does Deva.  Because she can't.

If any hint of the true Deva remains, it is buried deep in the darkness of her fraying psyche.

And if someone should find that lingering shred, then Deva may just speak her mind.

I revised and rewrote 11 chapters of the Game War's second draft this month.  One less than last month's 12.  However, a particular chapter from this month was a little longer, so I'll call it more or less even.

And Scrivener continues to be most handy for tracking down descriptions of settings and people that I need to reference later.  It's great for the revision phases of a novel.

Onward and offward.  Or words to that effect.

Players of the Game Out of Context Quote of the Month:

Ramansa: "Ah. Ben. You clever, furless bastard."

The Pursuit of William Abbey by Claire North

Claire North's novels often feature characters with esoteric, non-obvious supernatural powers/conditions.  Reliving your life again and again in a time loop while retaining your cumulative memories, being a body swapping ghost, and being forgotten as soon as you leave someone's line of sight.

This story features a foppish doctor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, William Abbey, who is cursed by a grieving South African mother after he stands by and watches the lynching of her son.  This act compels the son's ghost to pursue him as a shadow that shambles after him anywhere he goes, including over oceans

If the ghost touches him, it teleports to whomever he loves most, wherever they are in the world, and stops their heart.  Then it shambles back to him to do it again to the next person he loves.

And as the ghost gets closer, it allows him to know the truth of people's hearts.  When it gets too close, he's unable to stop himself from blurting out a litany of truths of anyone nearby.

This gets the attention of the British government.  Things do not go well.

The unreliable narrative tells a dual tale of William's conscription as a concert-of-nations era spy and a later time with a Nun who listens to his story in a front line hospital of the Great War's (WWI) western front.

Peter Kenny again does a fantastic job with the audio reading, especially the motor-mouthed desperation of his compulsion to tell the truth as his pursuing ghost gets nearer.

A fascinating yarn.

CGP Grey and Kurzgesagt Big Numbers Videos on Youtube

Youtube creators often put out lots of longer content at the end of the year for monetization reasons.  These two channels really did something interesting with big numbers.

CGP Grey did a Rock, Paper, Scissors video that ended up being a choose your own adventure of probability.  I initially just played through it once, because I thought that I'd be cheating if I just clicked through everything.

Then I heard him talking about it on the Cortex podcast and I learned that you're supposed to click through all of them.

What follows was a vast journey through the varying iterations of "anti-luck" of constantly losing and the ultimate good luck of winning so much after 25 rounds that the odds are in the trillions.  And what that actually means if you truly need one person in a trillion to win.

It soon delves into heavy existential territory.

Kurzgesagt takes a different aspect of large numbers.  Its "All of History- 4.5 Billion Years in 1 Hour" video starts right after Theia collided with the Earth to both enlarge the molten early Earth and create the moon.

Each second equals about 1.25 million years.  The earth is a molten hellscape for about 10-15 minutes, showing the vast length of the largely unknowable Hadean period.

It takes even more time for multicellular life to show up.  And multiple extinctions occur in the blink of an eye.  Primates literally show up in the last second.

It's probably the best demonstration of the scale of geological time versus the relative snap of the finger on which biological life operates.

Plus, it has some really chill music throughout.

Check both videos out.

That's all for this time.

Stay smart.  Stay safe.

Jim