Fantasist's Scroll

There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

You know, when I first started using the Internet, pretty much everything was free.  Once you got used to searching, you could find just about anything on the ‘net, all the way up to and including source code for all kinds of things.  So, in that spirit, I took some basic source code for some Perl language generation and manipulation scripts and modified them to run on the web.  Then I offered them for free, just for the simple fun of having them and letting people use them.  But, things have changed.  Now, times are tough and hosting a website costs money.   That in and of itself isn’t a problem, except the use and abuse of those simple, fun, free scripts have caused so many server usage issues that my webhost is insisting that I either disable them or pay for a higher grade of service that’s more than three times what I’m paying now.  So, guess what?  Yep, the scripts are going away.  Maybe I’ll figure out how to do them with PHP instead of Perl one day, but until then, I have to disable them.  Either that, or come up with over $200 a month for a dedicated server.

So, I’m afraid that it comes down to dollars and sense.  I don’t have the dollars, so I have to exercise a little sense and take the freebies off-line.

I wish I had a better solution, but I just don’t.  I hope you all enjoyed them while they were here, but, now, due to forces beyond my control, I have to shut them down.

UPDATE: For people looking for other free language generation software, you can check out the programs that I either adapted for the web, or that inspired me.  Chris Pound’s Language Machines pages held the first Perl code I worked with for many of the scripts and Jeffrey Henning’s amazing LangMaker was instrumental in much of my design.  (LangMaker is also available for free at Softpedia.)  So, please, don’t give up on your languages!  Check out what these guys offer and keep working on your fantasy!

By all rights, this blog should be dead.

Frankly, the entire website is so old and out of date and willfully not maintained that I’m surprised there’s any traffic to it.  But, there is.  And with any large volume of people, there are always those who take advantage and push free resources beyond their intended use.  Well, that’s just what happened here.

One of the many things I originally did with this site was dabble in conlangs, or CONstructed LANGuages.  Toward that end, I created or modified several Perl scripts to help me generate words that sounded authentic and consistent according to some linguistic rules.  When I was doing this, very few people were yet.  Now, there are many, many more people who offer language generation programs and scripts, but I think I was one of the first people to have free, interactive web pages that would let the neophyte conlanger generate or manipulate their language.  In fact, I’m not sure how many there are even today.  Hopefully, there are a lot more who can take the burden of people ramming quite literally gigabytes worth of data through their free resource.  I hope they have their own server, though, since when people did that here, it crashed the server I was on.  Yeah, that’s right, people ran so much data through my little programs that it crashed the server.  In spite of me asking them not to do it, then building in some fairly significant limitations on how much data could be sent to the script at once, a small percentage of the users, who I have come to think of as abusers, still managed to crash my webhost’s server.

So, sadly, my conlang scripts are starting to go off-line.  One bye one, like fading stars, they’re being pummeled off the internet by people who never appreciated them, apparently.
But, what really makes me sad is that so many people who did NOT abuse them, but used my little scripts to enhance and improve their writing or leasure time won’t be able to use them all any more.  Those innocent bystanders will simply have to do without because of the greed of a few pushy, obnoxious people who had to test the limits of the system.

So, to those of you who played nice and were friendly and enjoyed my little conlang scripts, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry, but now when they start to cause problems for my provider, I’ll have to take them off-line, one by one.
I hope you enjoyed them half as much as I did while they were here.

Today is the birthday of Kurt Cobain.

The singer-songwriter who essentially founded the “grunge” music movement, was born in Hoquiam, Washington on this day in 1967. He started from humble beginnings, working a job as a school janitor, but he started playing in local rock bands. He spent most of this time living at various friends’ houses and on the street, even occasionally sleeping under a bridge. In 1989, he and his bandmates saved up six hundred dollars to record their first album, Bleach, under the name Nirvana. The boys signed to a major label in 1991 for their next album, Nevermind, and Cobain was shocked when it sold more than 10 million copies.

He became internationally famous almost overnight, but Cobain hated being famous. He developed a heroin addiction that got worse and worse, and on April 5th of 1994 he committed suicide at his home in Seattle.

Today is the birthday of Kurt Cobain.

The singer-songwriter who essentially founded the “grunge” music movement, was born in Hoquiam, Washington on this day in 1967. He started from humble beginings, working a job as a school janitor, but he started playing in local rock bands. He spent most of this time living at various friends’ houses and on the street, even occasionally sleeping under a bridge. In 1989, he and his bandmates saved up six hundred dollars to record their first album, Bleach, under the name Nirvana. The boys signed to a major label in 1991 for their next album, Nevermind, and Cobain was shocked when it sold more than 10 million copies.

He became internationally famous almost overnight, but Cobain hated being famous. He developed a heroin addiction that got worse and worse, and on April 5th of 1994 he committed suicide at his home in Seattle.

According to Writer’s Almanac we have three birthdays to celebrate today.

First, there’s novelist Herbert George (H.G.) Wells, who was born in Bromley, England in1866. According to the note I got from Writer’s Almanac, Wells had a job writing biology textbooks until he developed a respiratory illness in his late 20s. Since he thought he didn’t have long to live, he left his wife and ran away with another woman, after which he began writing furiously. In roughly three years, he published all the novels for which we know him: The Time Machine, The Island of Dr. Moreau, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds.

It’s also the birthday of the novelist Stephen King, born in Portland, Maine in 1947. His father was a merchant seaman who left the family when Stephen was just two. He has no memories of his father, but one day he found a whole box full of his father’s science fiction and fantasy paperbacks, and that box of his father’s books inspired him to start writing horror stories.
He was working as a teacher when he wrote his first novel about a weird high school girl with psychic powers named Carrie White. He gave up on the book at one point and threw it in the trash. His wife rescued it. Carrie was published in 1973. The hard cover didn’t sell well, but then his agent called to say that the paperback rights had sold for $400,000.

Lastly, but, perhaps, most importantly, today is the birthday of the man who first put high quality literature into paperbacks, Sir Allen Lane, born in Bristol, England in 1902. He was the founder of Penguin Books.

Well, as several of you have noticed, there seem to be some on-going issues with the conlang scripts.  After getting them working again post ISP move, their usage has spiked to a level that the new ISP/WebHost can’t seem to handle.  So, I’m working on it.

Unfortunately, I’m also a cancer patient who’s got to go into the hospital rather frequently for chemotherapy, so I don’t have a lot of time or energy to work on the problem.  I’m about a third of the way through my treatments, so you can expect me to work on this issue sometime before the end of the year, but I can’t make any guarantees as to when.
Sorry.

Okay, so my idea of fun may be changing a bit.

I’ve noticed a theme in my cancer caregivers’ rhetoric lately: clean. Get clean, stay clean, avoid things that aren’t clean. Wash your hands, gargle with their special solution to keep the mouth sores away, don’t eat raw foods that might have bacteria on them. This over-riding theme of cleanliness may have had some small effect on my choice of interesting links.

First, with all the house cleaning, there was this tool to minimize, if not eliminate, dust from doing wall-board work. Now, that might not seem like a big thing, but, trust me, all that dust is an irritant for months to come after the work is done! I know, having stuck my leg through a ceiling while running cable and doing the repair work myself.
Next, is a link to a toothbrush sanitizer, which has always been a thing for me. Well, not toothbrush sanitizing, per se, but generally good oral hygine. I’m always worried about things stuck in my teeth and bad breath and making sure my gums don’t bleed. That’s gotten very important to me these days! Bleeding is bad when my red and white counts are down so low!
And, this automatic soap dispenser caught my eye, since I’m washing my hands so much. Before I even saw it, I was thinking about how the most likely point of contact for bacteria was at the soap dispenser. An automatic soap dispenser would cure that and this shiny, chrome one would look nice on my bathroom counter!
Finally, while not a cleanliness link, this web-enabled pill box struck me as just the thing for someone having to track a bunch of medications. Their service, which isn’t quite available yet, helps a patient keep track of all the various medications and times and frequencies they have to take. And, at $60 a month, trust me, this would have been a Godsend this past week. I have so many pills to take that a little extra help keeping them straight would have been a big help!

So, there you are, that’s what sounds “fun” to a cancer patient with a lot on his mind! Kind of boring, but at least it’s something to think about over the weekend. Enjoy your Friday!  (And, yes, this was also posted on my other blog, Diary of a Network Geek.)

Today is the birthday of Alfred M. Butts, the man who invented the game Scrabble.

Butts was born on this day in 1899, in Poughkeepsie, New York. He trademarked the game in 1949, but his game didn’t sell very well. Only a few thousand copies of the game were sold, until 1950s when the president of Macy’s played the game on vacation and got hooked. He ordered more for his store, and Scrabble became a great success.
Scrabble has been a favorite of many writers, including the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who had a special Russian version made for himself and his wife.