fake shadows and real elliptic curves
Kind readers,
Things continue to happen! Here are many tidbits of news.
On the North Continent Ribbon front, the Neon Hemlock Kickstarter is now finished, and it reached the "more art" stretch goal! That means scraps of ribbon and other illustrative objects in between chapters--I'm particularly excited for a portrait of Ise's best friend, the six-legged salamander.
While I was refreshing all my social media notifications and wondering about salamander art, I discovered that somebody had turned their playthrough of my tiny solo rpg Monster in the Wilderness into a podcast! I really enjoy hearing about the monsters that people invent; this is the first playthrough I've heard about with a monstrous sidekick.
Meanwhile, the poetry anthology Heartbeat of the Universe is out in the world! The celebratory reading included poems about ants and the highly science-fictional experience of watching Ian Goh flicker in and out from Singapore as he read a poem about ghosts. Scroll down at the publisher's page and you'll find bookstore links.
I wrote this month's American Math Society Feature Column, Elliptic curves come to date night, about a surprising connection between game theory and some of modern geometry's most popular (and delectable?) objects. The column is based on a paper by İrem Portakal and Bernd Sturmfels. Portakal uses oranges as her personal symbol because that's what her last name means in Turkish; this warms the etymology-nerd parts of my heart. (If you're keeping score in the board game debate, she is very firmly on Team Wingspan.)
On my own blog, I reviewed Rebecca Fraimow's forthcoming novel Lady Eve's Last Con. It's frothy and charming yet never loses sight of the precarity of life in outer space.
In a more local yet still delightful illusion, Gennoveus managed to pose as Kosmas's shadow, thereby imitating a much smaller cat:
Very truly yours,
Ursula.