The Wertzone: The White Luck Warrior by R. Scott Bakker The Aspect-Emperor, Anasurimbor Kellhus, is leading the Great Ordeal into the heart of the Ancient North. Hundreds of thousands of troops and thousands of sorcerers are heading for Golgotterath, the seat of the vile Consult, where they plan to destroy the Ark of the Heavens and obliterate the alien Inchoroi before they can resurrect the No-God and plunge Earwa into the Second Apocalypse. After the relatively painless opening leg of the march, the Ordeal now crosses through hundreds of miles of territory infested by the vile Sranc, whose numbers blanket the earth. For Sorweel, the young King of Sakarpas who has been sworn to Kellhus's cause but continues to harbour doubts, the Ordeal is doubly a nightmare, for he also seeks to avenge the death of his father and serve the gods, who, blind to the machinations of the Consult, are offended by Kellhus's temerity and fear his power. The White Luck Warrior sees Bakker achieving a near-perfect balance in his work.
Don’t Mind Your Language Language. Language, language, language. In the end it all comes down to language. I write to you today on this subject as a way of welcoming you to www.stephenfry.com 2.0 and because, well, it’s a subject worth thinking about at any time and because fewer things interest me quite so much. Image: Nicole Stewart for SamFry There are so many questions and issues jostling, tumbling and colliding in my mind that I can barely list them. “Language is the universal whore that I must make into a virgin,” wrote Karl Kraus or somebody so like him that it makes no odds. I suppose we should remind ourselves of the old distinction made by the structuralists and structural linguists. The two for consideration however as those once fashionable Frenchies designated them are Langue, language as an idea, and parole, language as utterance. I’ve used this analogy before, but I’ll use it again. I’m veering all over the shop. For me, it is a cause of some upset that more Anglophones don’t enjoy language.
107 Regional Slang Words - mental_floss on YouTube (Ep. 25) The OF Blog: R. Scott Bakker, The White-Luck Warrior The largest Sranc clans the Horselords battled rarely numbered more than several hundred. Sometimes a particularly cruel and cunning Sranc chieftain would enslave his neighbours and open warfare would range across the Pale. And the legends were littered with stories of Sranc rising in nations and overcoming the Outermost Holds. Sakarpus itself had been besieged five times since the days of the Ruiner.But this... slaughter.Only some greater power could have accomplished this.Meat sweated in open sunlight. Flies steamed about the scrub and grasses. The White-Luck Warrior, R. As in The Judging Eye, there are three main scenes of action: The Great Ordeal, led by the Aspect-Emperor and whose main narrative PoV is that of the young Sarkapian king, Sorweel; the "slog" guided by the Wizard Achamian and his lost lover's daughter Mimara; and Momemn, where the Aspect-Emperor's wife fights to maintain control of the empire while her husband is away. The plot here is very tight.
“The Life of Slang” by Julie Coleman The literature of slang is vast, its two most important monuments being Eric Partridge’s “Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” (1937) and Harold Wentworth and Stuart Berg Flexner’s “Dictionary of American Slang” (1960) . Coleman pays due if reserved respect to the former (she finds it useful but dated, which is fair enough) but mentions the latter only in passing, which is strange given the importance of American slang not only to her overall subject but also to her book. Given that she is English, a British bias is understandable and forgivable in “The Life of Slang,” but American readers are likely to feel that she gives too much attention to British slang of the 18th and 19th centuries and too little to the American slang that, for better and worse, has become a central part of the English-speaking world’s vocabulary and, for that matter, has encroached on the vocabularies of other languages. Slang “creates in-groups and out-groups and acts as an emblem of belonging.”
New R. Scott Bakker Interview (part 1) Many thanks to Bakker, who as always is very forthcoming and thoughtful with his answers. As the title implies, this is the first part of a longer interview. Bakker couldn't get to the questions from fans before my Eastern European adventure, so those questions will have to wait for a few weeks. There’s as many answers to this question as there readers of the series. The idea is the same: embrace the genre, then stuff it with as much craziness as I can get away with. Values are judgments, so when you abandon one set for another, as happens to so many in university, you are in effect learning how to play a different ‘judgment game.’ Bullshit. Even worse, it stigmatizes ‘intellectualism,’ renders it the marker of an adversarial social identity. As if they were anything more than another boot. And I remain another lunatic in the institutional wilderness. Is an ‘easter egg’ the same thing as a herring? In a sideways manner, definitely. Few things are more epic than the Holy Bible.
Language Wars From the first time we step into an English class, we’re told that the rules matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it’s appropriate to use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these things really matter? Outside of the classroom, what difference does it make if we write “who” instead of “whom” or say “good” instead of “well”? It does make a difference, at least sometimes. But how different would things be if I walked into the sports bar down the street on a Sunday afternoon and asked, “For whom are we rooting today?” Why did it go so wrong? All of the complex linguistic theories of language acquisition and whether grammar is universally hardwired or learned through practice don’t matter one bit in practical everyday living. Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that’s the way the people in power communicate. This is not even to mention the descriptivists’ dirty little secret.
Confirmation Bias Part of America's 'Just Do It!' Culture New research finds people primed to think in terms of action are more certain of their opinions and less likely to seek out dissenting views. We humans have a stubborn tendency to focus on information that confirms our pre-existing beliefs. The 21st-century media facilitates this presumptuous proclivity: It’s easy to avoid discomforting contradictory claims when there are websites and cable news networks tailored to fit your particular prejudice. Newly published research points to another factor that feeds this ingrained confirmation bias: Our “Just do it!” “The growing need for activity in the United States may contribute to a loss of objectivity in the way citizens gather information,” University of Alabama psychologist William Hart and University of Illinois psychologist Dolores Albarracin write in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science. The researchers found evidence for this thesis in three experiments. A follow-up experiment again produced this effect.
Book Review: The White Luck Warrior: The Aspect Emperor, Book 2 by R. Scott Bakker For a movement driven by a group as supposedly radical and freethinking as artists are supposed to be, the history of Western art prior to the twentieth century, especially literature, is marked by its adherence to convention. Perhaps it was economic need, if one wanted audiences to attend your plays or read your books, so you had to give them what they had come to expect. There were few troubling grey areas when it came to morality as questions of good and evil were defined by however Christianity was being filtered by the society of the day. Nineteenth century Britain, with its need to justify moral superiority over what it deemed inferior races, produced works that might question certain practices, but not even Dickens ever questioned the system which gave rise to the conditions described in his books or the morality that allowed them to exist. Still, it's only been recently that one of the oldest forms of literary story telling, the epic tale, has received the same treatment.
The Final Sacrifice The Final Sacrifice (also known as Quest for the Lost City) is an independent Canadian horror film released in 1990. It was directed by Tjardus Greidanus, a freshman at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology, and stars Christian Malcolm as Troy McGreggor and Bruce J. Mitchell as Zap Rowsdower. Plot[edit] In the first scene of the film, hooded men chase a lone man through a snowy forest. A shot rings out and the opening credits roll. The protagonist, Troy McGreggor, finds a map belonging to his late father, who was shot seven years earlier, as the first scene depicts. The map leads Troy and Rowsdower all over Alberta, through some hidden caves, and finally to the unkempt house of a grizzled fugitive by the name of Mike Pipper (Ron Anderson). Eventually, Troy is captured by Satoris and his cult, who use the map to locate their ancient idol. Production[edit] Home media release[edit] Mystery Science Theater 3000[edit] References[edit] External links[edit]