Fantasist's Scroll

You’d think this belongs on my other blog, which is tech oriented, but…

Well, okay, it probably belongs there, too. Wired News ran this story about the efforts of researchers to localize cell phones for Ethiopia last week. It’s interesting to me for a number of reasons.
First, there’s the “alphabet”, which is actually a syllabary. It’s got over 300 characters and is nothing at all like the Roman alphabet. (You can see what it looks like at Omniglot.com.) A bit of a challenge for the English-speaking cell phone designers!
Second, it’s a fascinating look at the way technology effects us and the way we effect technology. The goal was to get SMS into the hands of farmers who could use it for communication and weather prediction to better manager their crops.
Thirdly, it’s a look at a section of the world that I hear about all too little. Africa is most likely the birth-place of man, or at least the tribe of man from which modern Europeans descended, but it seems so primative by our, oh, so refined Western standards.

In short, it was a very interesting look at an aspect of life that I rarely see. How will all that change in the future? Where will it all end up? How much will situations like that be the norm out on space colonies, if we ever get them? Language and technology make for very interesting idea combonations. There’s lots of stories there.

Did someone take my idea?

Or is it just so, so lame that more than one person thought of it? Okay, let me explain. See, I’ve had this idea for a fantasy fiction setting that I called the Five Kingdoms for several years. In fact, I’ve been talking about it so long that I don’t even remember how far back it goes. But, the other day when I was looking through some stuff on CafePress, I found a book called The Sorean, which has, right on the cover, a reference to “Tales from the Five Kingdoms”. I laughed so hard I almost ruptured something. The whole thing just totally cracked me up.

I knew that, sooner or later, this kind of thing would happen when CafePress started selling books. Of course, I figured that there’d be plenty of folks selling books that they’d taken from Project Gutenberg, and there are, but some of the other stuff surprised me a bit. A pleasant surprise was the Ethereal Press Language series. As someone who’s “into” constructed languages, these books were really interesting to me. I’m not sure that I’d ever buy one, but I think it’s great that someone is making them.
I also found more “serious” books, like The Book Of AisthC*tikos, which advertises itself for the “serious student of the occult”. So, all you lame posers can piss off! This book isn’t for you!
The other thing that was fun to browse through was the CafePress music offerings. Now, to be fair, some of these are probably really, really good, but undiscovered bands. On the other hand, some of them are just funny. My favorite “WTF” music cd was Shut Up The Devil by King MC. The devil is totally whack, yo!

And, of course, there is my very own Ye Old Wizard’s Shoppe, now with more panties. It’s really almost a joke, but if anyone ever buys anything, and I mean anything, I might just pay for a “premium” shop and do more with it. Anyway, I guess I may just be forced to give up on the Five Kingdoms and move on. After all, I wouldn’t want to infringe on any market right that The Sorean might now have. (Yes, I’m kidding.)

And, for that matter, gaming.

One of my favorite constructed worlds, or “conworld”, is Tékumel, which is an ongoing project of M.A.R. Barker. One of Professor Barker’s assertions is that religous belief is very important to a created world, but often overlooked or done poorly. In games, we find poorly understood real-world religons being “modernized” or otherwise adapted to the game world in a very surface-level way. Or, religions are simply motions that people go through with little thought or belief behind it. And, while such things often occur in our own world, more people actually believe in a religion of some kind than simply take it as a set of rituals to perform. In any case, it is usually quite a bit more complicated than the way most folks represent. Professor Barker wrote an article about it which you can find in the Blue Room Archives at Tékumel.com It’s worth reading if you’re thinking about integrating a “real” religion into your work.

Oh, my stars, yes, loads of fun!

I first saw the Ghyll Encyclopedia, then the blog post that inspired it. So, I came to understand this glory in a ’round about fashion. Still, it seems like loads of fun. I have no idea how many readers this sad blog draws, but I hope they all go to discover the joys of this game. In fact, I like it so much, I may just set up one of my own! Yes, it’s that inventive.

Oh, for Heaven’s sake, it’s Friday, go see!
(And, yes, I am, in fact, the alter ego of “Doctor” Phineas Crank.)

Freshly added to the conlang word generator.

Yep, that’s right, now you can generate words, and names, based on languge files torn from the pages of Michael Moorcock’s Elric of Melnibone series. I’ve very carefully entered in loads of words and proper names from the series by hand from several different sources. The beauty of it is, no one could tell if I’d made any spelling errors! These are some seriously crazy names.
Oh, that reminds me, they’re also available in the proper name generator, too. And, just because it strikes me as funny, I’ve also added Melnibonean combined with Latin to both of these. And, I have to admit, it really works fairly well! (Though, the straight Melnibonean occasionally coughs up a little too much data in the name generator. There must be a hidden character somewhere in the file that’s messing things up. Oh, well, no one’s perfect!)

So, go have fun with them!

Okay, mainly it’s just planets….

But, it’s still cool! Last week, I mentioned several articles about habitable planets outside our solar system, so it’s been on my mind. Well, today, my Friday Fun Link is to a site called Extrasolar Visions, which is the home of the artist who did the amazing graphics that are on the Space.com site. He has a gallery there, but the work is mainly small stuff with links to where you can buy prints of the work. But, he also has something called Extrasolar Skies, which makes starmaps on the fly. As the name implies, it also lets you choose your viewing location. Very cool. And fun, too!

So, hey, it’s Friday, go dream a little!

Been a lot of talk about extrasolar planets lately…

In the past week, Space.com has reported about both a “giant Earth” and two Neptune-sized planets being found. So, there’s been a lot of talk about voyages to other planets and finding other Earths lately. I think we’ll eventually go, but it’ll be in generation ships and things on Earth will have to get really desperate first. After all, that would be a “one-way” trip.
That’s nice and all, but I think they’re missing the boat in some ways. I mean, why not inhabitable moons? According to Space.com, they could very well exist. In fact, I speculated on that quite some time ago and I even got a physist to back me up! A very nice man by the name of Sheridan Simon, who’s also done work for Lawrence Watt-Evans, did up a whole planetary system for me. I actually based it around Tau Ceti, which he said was a good choice, actually, since it’s very similar to our own star. Anyway, he did up a whole system for me. I ought to scan it and make it available on-line… Well, we’ll see about that, but it is an interesting line of thought for science-fiction, isn’t it?
Read the articles, think, then write! Go on!

Okay, so I’ve been busy!

Whew! Let’s see… I haven’t posted much in the past week because I’ve been adding and updating features on the site. For one, The Alchemist’s Attic is now on the standard menu bar. For another, that standard menu bar is now on the results of all my cgi scripts. (Yes, along with all the nice advertising…) And, I’ve added the Fantasy Pocket “Litter” generator to my Worldbuilding and Resources pages.

I’ve also been working on plugins for the WordPress blog system, which I will eventually be converting to for this section of the site. They’re not quite ready for public release, but when they are, I’ll have a Moon Phase plugin, a Chinese Zodiac plugin and a Forgotten Realms (Dale Reckoning) dates plugin. That last is the really tricky one, but when I’m done it will have all the functions to let you run an entire blog, including the calendar in the Dale Reckoning date system, which is used in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for Dungeons and Dragons.
That last plugin was developed in preparation for my own custom calendar system which I intend to use in a blog set in a fantasy world. The idea being that it would tell a very personal story of one of the inhabitants of said world. Sort of like a fantasy version of the Pepys Diary.

So, as you can see, I really have been busy! But, I promise I’ll post more cool things here soon.