Fantasist's Scroll

The Rosetta Project is really rolling now.

I first read about this in a news story in Wired. Their goal is to create a permanent, or near permanent record of dying languages. Their goal is to preserve at least a thousand of the roughly 7,000 languages on the planet. They expect more than 80% of those languages to die out due to globalization and modernization. What Wired talked about was the method they plan to use for preservation. Somewhat suprisingly, they don’t plan to use a computer-based technology. Rather, they’re going with a low-tech, but durable and easy to use, disk etched with examples of the same text in all 1,000 languages, just like the famous Rosetta Stone that allowed us to dechiper ancient Egyptian. (The text, incidentally, is the first book of the Bible, Genesis.)

But, what interests me the most is the on-line language search engine and the Comparative Word List Generator. With this bad-boy a person can generate lists, or tables, of the translations for the 207 most widely used and important words in language. Now, not every language listed has this table compiled, but the major languages all do and quite a few of the less major languages do, too. In any case, it sure is cool to play with when thinking about creating a language. Shoot, they even have grammars and phonologies and orthographies for hundreds, in some cases thousands, of languages. It’s well worth checking out!

Time for the obligitory reflective entry.

Well, here we are at the dawn of the new year, so, of course, I’m obliged to look back at the past year. Why is that? Damn traditionalists.
It’s been a fairly decent year, actually. I found a new, better webhost. I actually produced content for the website. Hey, I even did real work in the role-playing game industry! (Of course, there are some doubts in my mind about that ever being more than a “protfolio builder”, but still, I did the work.)
I gave up some bad habits this year and started to develop some new, better ones. Maybe 2003 will be the year I actually get off my fat butt and write a story again. God knows, I’ve done a bunch of reading that was geared toward research this year. I should start messing around with the Story Starter I have on this very website. After all, I put it here to help writers struggling with Writer’s Block, and that would mean I qualify.
But, other Good Things seem to get in my way when I try to write. Things like my lovely wife, and our daughter, and the holidays, and our house which needs some repairs, and our yard which is in sad shape, and my day job as a computer geek. You know, LIFE. Ah, but hope springs eternal, so I keep the dream alive.

Like I wrote at the begining of this entry, it’s been a pretty good year. Sure, I have lots of room for improvement, but who doesn’t? So, next year, I get to work on the improvements.

Happy New Year everyone!

Ah, the ever elusive balance.

Everytime I think of the Highlander movies, I can hear Sean Connery’s voice in my head singing “B-A-L-A-N-C-E, balance!” It’s quirky, I know, but it rings so, so true. Balance is so important, yet it seems to be so hard to find.
For instance, trying to balance a day-job, writing, and managing this web site without losing track of where my wife and checkbook are is quite a balancing act. One that I’m afraid I don’t do very well at all. I always try to err on the side of my wife and my checkbook, but that doesn’t always happen. Sometimes, the day-job wins. Occasionally, the website wins. But, unfortunately, writing almost always loses. Sad, but true. The funny thing is, writing is what got me started on this website! I originally had the idea that I would use it to showcase my writing and the writing of other unknowns who were trying to break into print. It’s pretty hard to showcase writing when I’m not!
But, balance is maintained. I have a good job, which pays for this site, incidentally. And, I’ve really been enjoying my wife’s company lately. And, even though I was out of work for a year and ran out of money, I’m getting caught up in the checkbook department, too. To accomplish all that though, something had to suffer. Hence, no writing. Maybe that will change as things settle down in my new job, but I’m not too worried. After all, Grandma Moses didn’t even start painting until she was over 60. I have plenty of time. In the meantime, of course, I will content myself to update the website and dream.

And try really hard not to beat myself up for not writing.
Honest.

Save Wil Wheaton!

I saw Wil Wheaton on the Screen Savers last night and was very impressed. I think for a lot of us, poor Wil is sort of frozen in time as Wesley Crusher from Star Trek. But, he’s really a whole lot more.
First of all, he’s done a lot more than just Star Trek, of course. He’s really quite an accomplished actor.
Secondly, he’s not the kid I think so many of us percieved him to be. He’s actually pretty cool. And, unlike a lot of stars, he has a fairly good sense of where he fits in the world. He can even make jokes about himself!

Last night they looked at Google search stats for the past year and someone made a comment about how so many people had searched for Will Wheaton, the jazz musician. Megan Morrone, from the Screen Savers, made the joke that everyone should go out and search for our very own Wil Wheaton and improve his listings for next year. Wil joked that he was sure “everyone” had time to worry about his search listings on Google.
Well, when I got done laughing at his self-depreciating humor, I thought, “well, why not?” And, indeed, why shouldn’t we all help Wil out? All it would take is for everyone who has a blog or web page that enjoys Wil Wheaton to put a link to Google like this: Wil Wheaton or like this: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=wil+wheaton That way, every time a spider hits our pages, it should, in theory, hit Google and do that search. Viola! Increased search hits for Wil Wheaton! Hey, why not? It could be fun to use their own spiders against them!

Note: I’m a lazy bastard. I copied this directly from my blog at RyuMaou.com. Now you know.

I was watching Dune, the motion picture not the mini-series, today and got to thinking, which usually means trouble.

See, I liked the movie. That’s a kind of Dune fan heresy, because the movie really isn’t the book hardly at all. Oh, the characters are all there and they do most of the same things, but it’s not really the book. The movie adds in all kinds of weird extras, like the “wierding modules” and the freaky Harkonnen heart=plugs and junk. But, I saw the movie and sort of distanced it from the book. I see them as totally different things.
The book was a sweeping epic of socio-political commentary, military action, and religious exploration. It was to science-fiction what the Lord of the Rings was to fantasy. I read the book at least a dozen times and the rest of the trilogy at least three times, as well. Everytime I read it, Dune became something more. There was a new layer revealed or a new insight gained. The first time I read Dune, I missed the fact that Baron Harkonnen was homosexual, for instance. I caught subtleties in the writing about religion that I totally missed the first time, too. It’s one of the few books that I used to like to read on a regular basis. In fact, the book is so powerful and important to me that the fact my wife read it more than once was one of the things that made me want to marry her. I’ve met a very few women who interested me that have read Dune, but she’s the only one that I know ever read it more than once.
But, the movie is a very, very different story. The sets and atmosphere are lovely, but not at all what I imagined when I read the book. The juxtaposition of far future technology with Victorian design really made a wonderfully rich visual statement. For instance, the “glow globes” that Frank Herbert described are not at all what I saw in the film. I pictured glowing spheres with a control ring around the center. What David Lynch pictured was a glowing lozenge with stylized, Victorian wings done in a kind of wrought iron. Very, very different look and feel alltogether. Also, the uniforms are very much like the World War I British Navy uniforms that I’ve seen from old movies and costume books. Very different from the more modern military uniforms that I felt Frank Herbert described in his book.
There are other significant differences, but they only seem to bother people who know the book intimately and expect the movie to follow their vision of Dune faithfully. I rather expected that the movie would be nothing like the book, so I had no such expectations. In fact, I was telling my wife just this afternoon that I saw the book and the movie as two totally different stories. They may share characters and themes and even plot, but they differ significantly enough that they just seem totally different to me. And that’s okay! If I want to relive the book, I’ll go read it again. But, if I want to be entertained by some good sci-fi, I’ll go watch the movie. On the other hand, if I want to see something very close to what I pictured when I read Dune, I’ll go watch the mini-series.
In my opinion, the mini-series came much, much closer to the book than the movie. I wish Frank Herbert had been around to see it. I think he would have been pleased. Though, I did think they cleaned up a lot of the “naughty bits” for TV. The Baron, in particular, was more accurate and much more subtle in the mini-series than in the movie. I had a much easier time believing that he could be the devlish mastermind that Herbert described in his book than that movie Baron. In fact, in the movie the characters pretty much seemed like characatures while in the mini-series, they seemed more realistic. The mini-series characters certainly seemed more like what Herbert described. It’s too bad, really, that we’ll never know how Herbert felt about the mini-series. I really would have liked to know with which he was more pleased.

A little known fact, incidentally, was the Frank Herbert knew that he was dying of cancer by the time the movie was being filmed. In fact, I read in an interview that it was one of the main motiviations he had for doing the movie. See, writers don’t have retirement or death benefits, so he didn’t have much to leave his family. Dune the movie let him leave them something. And, now, of course, his son, Brian, is making quite a bit of money off his father’s creation by writing novels in the Dune universe. Maybe I’ll share my views on that some other time….