Fantasist's Scroll

Happy birthday, Bond!
Well, it’s more accurate to wish his creator, Ian Flemming, happy birthday.
Yes, today is Ian Flemming‘s birthday, according to the Wikipedia. Born in London, England in 1908, Flemming wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II, he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence. After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book.
After a several books that sold less and less well, Flemming started to write with the movies in mind. He wrote more sensational books filled with a larger than “normal” helping of psychopathic killers, beautiful women and bizarre plots to conquer the world. Though his books began to sell better, it was only years later that the movie industry took an interest, thus sealing the hopes of budding novelists everywhere of selling the movie rights to their novel.

Well, happy birthday anyway.

Well, it seems my antiquated Perl code is just a little too much for my new webhost’s servers to handle.

My web implementation of the Zompist Sound Change Applier almost killed their server this past weekend.  It uses a CPAN library that someone created, based on the Zompist code, and it’s getting a little “long in the tooth”, as Perl libraries go, so I suspect that has something to do with it.  So, in any case, the end result is that I had to take it off-line.  And, I don’t think it will ever be back.  I suppose, if I can find a way to port it to PHP, which is doubtful, it might make a return.  But, honestly, I wouldn’t count on it.

What I will do, in the next week or so, is post my code here, slightly cleaned, for you all to use and enjoy.  I won’t have time to support it, but I will make it available to anyone who wants to use it.  Also, if I can find it, I’ll make available the original Perl code that is NOT designed to run on the web, but on a local machine.  That way, if there’s some brave soul who’s willing to take that code and make it available to run from their website, they won’t have to do too much work to get a minimally functional system.
So, watch this space for forthcoming code!

Well, just weeks after announcing that all my conlang language machines are back on-line, I’ve had to take one down.  My Dialect Maker seems to be a CPU hog on the server.  Also, in spite of coding it so that it should only run one instance at a time, it somehow got two loaded on my ISP’s server.

So, I’ve tweaked the code an I’m waiting for my ISP to approve it before I load it up.  But, I have to tell you, if the sound changer is the only thing that has problems, I may just let it go.  It uses an old library for Perl that’s probably out of date.  Then, I hope, it would be easier to convert everything else to a PHP script/page/whatever and not have to rely on Perl.  I love using Perl, but it can be a resource hog.

Anyway, stay tuned for more news.

No, that title’s not a mistake, it’s an homage.
Today is the birthday of novelist Vladimir Nabokov. Though he was born in St. Petersburg, Russia on this day in 1899 Nabokov and his family had to flee Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. He sailed to America with his family in 1940, arriving in New York City poor and almost completely unknown. He struggled to support his family with a series of jobs teaching at New England colleges. Then, in the summer of 1951, he and his wife drove to Colorado in their Oldsmobile station wagon and he began to work on his most infamous novel, Lolita.

The novel was hugely controversial, but the controversy helped the novel become a big best-seller. Nabokov was finally able to quit teaching and move with his wife to a hotel in Switzerland where he continued writing.

For those few, brave souls that still read this blog, be of good cheer, for you will be the first to know that my infamous conlang scripts are reactivated.  Yes, that’s right, all those good, tasty scripts for generating languages on the fly are active once again.

My webhost has changed hands several times and the most current owner of my web account has done an update on the servers, so, we’ve tried reactivating the devilish conlang scripts that seemed to cause so many before them trouble.  No idea how long, or if, they’ll stay up and running, but, for the moment, they are.
Use them in good health!

Today is William S. Burroughs‘ birthday.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri on this day in 1914, he is best known for having written Naked Lunch, which was later turned into a movie that starred Peter Weller. He started writing while attending Harvard, but when a piece of his was rejected by Esquire magazine, he was so disappointed that he didn’t write again for six years. He tried to enlist in the military, but he was turned down by the Navy,and when he got into the Army infantry, his mother arranged for him to be given a psychiatric discharge.
So, at 30 years old, he moved to New York City and got involved in a bohemian scene. It was there that he was introduced to two younger men, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. He also got addicted to heroin, and wrote his first book about it, a memoir called Junky. It came out in 1953.
Burroughs is also famous for having accidentally shot his wife at a party while recreating the infamous “William Tell scene.”

You may have noticed this blog dying a slow death.

There’s a reason I haven’t been posting much here, besides author birthdays, lately.  Beyond the fact that I’ve been battling cancer, this site has grown in a chaotic way and in directions I did not intend.  What’s more, the name no longer describes what I intend for my creative endeavors.  I feel limited by the name, Fantasist.net, to, well, fantasy.  But, even here, there is a fair amount of science-fiction, too.  And, I don’t want to be limited to either genre.  So, I’m brainstorming a new domain name and I’ll eventually set up a new site, with a new look, that’s less restrictive in nature.

In the meantime, I’ll keep posting writer’s birthdays, but not much else.
If you’d like to see what I’m up to these days, check out my much more current blog, Diary of a Network Geek.  (And, yes, it is my goal to move all my conlang resources to the new site and get them all working again, too!)

Three birthdays today, all brought to you by way of the Writer’s Almanac.

Today is the birthday of Carl Jung, who was born in Kesswil, Switzerland in 1875. His father was a pastor who was losing his faith. This so shocked Jung as a boy that he decided to become a scientist instead of a minister in order to scientifically prove that religion was important. He is considered the founder of analytic psychology.
More importantly to writers, he noticed that myths and fairytales from all kinds of different cultures have certain similarities, which he called “archetypes”. He believed that these universal archetypes come from a collective unconscious that all humans share. He said that if people get in touch with these archetypes in their own lives, they will be happier and healthier.
He and Sigmund Freud were contemporaries and they even collaborated for a few years, but finally decided that they disagreed with each other’s ideas. Jung thought Freud was too obsessed with sex, and Freud thought Jung was too obsessed with God.

It’s also the birthday of science-fiction writer Aldous Huxley, who was born in Surrey, England on this day in 1894. Huxley wanted to be a scientist like his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, but a childhood disease left him almost blind, so he became a writer. His first successful novel was Point Counter Point, which was an extremely ambitious book. Huxley decided that his next book would be something light. He had been reading some H.G. Wells and thought it would be interesting to try to write something about what the future might be like. The result was Brave New World, about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families; people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called “soma.”
Brave New World was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality.

And, finally it’s also the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1856. He wrote dozens of plays, but he’s best known for his play Pygmalion, about what happens when a phonetician named Henry Higgins teaches a cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle to pass as a lady.
Shaw had an opinion about everything, and eventually became famous more for his personality than for his writing. He was a vegetarian and a pacifist, he didn’t drink, and he believed Christmas should be abolished. In 1925, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died 25 years later in 1950 at the age of 94.
He is now one of the most widely quoted writers in the English language.
He said, “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” And he said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” And he said, “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”