(Original Review, 2005-11-30)


In Genesis there is suddenly this sentence/observation about giants walking the Earth in them days... I always see those elderly male Jews in Babylon, staring glumly at some campfire, thinking about the good old days and thinking up revengeful plans to smite the enemy. They tell the stories of their tribes but there is that one quite senile idiot always going on about 'them giants' - so in the end they say, "Okay, we WILL put them in. Now shut up already!" I can see myself being the Giant Guy (if more all over the place) and I'm not sure the good campfire folks here need the distraction...

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

(Original review, 2005)



"Urgit, High King of Othol Murgos, sat on his garish throne in the Drojim Palace of Rak Urga"


In "Sourceress of Darshiva" by David Eddings


"Urgit, High King of Othol Murgos, was wearing a blue doublet and hose, and he sat up on his garish throne in the Drojim Palace."

In "Seeress of Kell" by David Eddings


Uhm...something is afoot here...Is it possible Eddings is copying himself...?

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

(Original Review, 2005)


Random thoughts while attempting to read the book (the edition is shitty: it's full of typos)


In EM theory, which is Lorentz invariant, there's a relation between the magnitudes of the E and B fields for light (not if you use Planck units. The magnitudes of c and h tell you nothing about physics, but a lot about biology. I don't claim that's original, BTW. I'm trying to recall who said it first, Monod or Schrödinger, E/B = c. That's quite a magnitude difference of the E over the B already. So if you could gradually increase c the structure of a light beam changes radically. But the reason for c is probably tied to quantum vacuum properties so you've got changes there too. In fact I would find it entirely reasonable not to expect invariance in E and/or B while the early universe was trying to sort out its equilibrium conditions during falling out of the gravitational, electromagnetic, weak forces just after the BB.

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The thing that astonishes me, continually, is the fans who cannot see it and, in some cases, cannot even perceive that the quality has fallen off disastrously as he got mired in unimportant sub-plots. He reminds me of a story told by one my bosses I used to have a long time ago. This guy was head director. When I started working in that department I found none of the rest of the staff would speak to him because they had decided he was completely incompetent. He wasn't. He was good at certain things but not all the things he had to do (such as managing people) as head director. Work piled up and up and his desk was a vast pile of papers which stuff disappeared into.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.

Milton wrote a great poem but it's also a byproduct of its day - 1667 - and he views events and characters very much through the male gaze; as do all organized religions and which the poem references. Thus, the apple on the tree of knowledge was (imo) something a religious-minded white Portuguese male would regard as sinful. As it stands, the sin no longer applies. It is 2005, eating the apple amounts to doing just that; eating an apple. Unless you have the apple representing something else, i.e., update the sin attached to it.

If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review.