Fantasist's Scroll

Don’t forget, this isn’t really my most active blog anymore and hasn’t been for quite some time.  For that, really, I’d prefer you go to my main, personal website, JKHoffman.com.  I call my blog there Use Your Words, because I’m a frustrated writer.  If I hadn’t listened to my High School AP English teacher and majored in English, I might not have majored in Marketing and wandered away from writing after college.  Then again, my career in tech makes my websites possible, so maybe it’s not such a bad thing!  Besides, as everyone told me then, there will be time enough to write when I retire.

Anyway, for the most recent posting and so on, head over to JKHoffman.com.

Oy vey!  It’s been a long, long time since I wrote here!

Frankly, it’s been a long time for a lot of reasons, but, mostly, because my creative endeavors have moved in other directions.  For one thing, I’ve been doing more photography, which you can find here, as well as working on at least two other sites; Diary of a Network Geek and something a little more personal, JKHoffman.com

But, I’ve also been working at my day job a lot.  And, that, of course, combined with a general malaise and chaotic busyness, have all led to a pretty negative impact on my personal spirituality.  I’d like to say I’ve been seeking that, but, frankly, I’ve just been a little too burned out for even that much personal growth.

So, as a result, this blog, this site, this entire creative idea has languished.
And, honestly, it probably will continue to languish.  If not for the history of it, and some of the back-end server details that no one cares about besides me and my webhost, I’d have shut the whole thing down a long, long time ago.
In any case, if you want to see what else I’m up to, check out one of those other sites.

Thanks!

The conlang scripts may not have been the problem after all!

Perhaps, when we do track down the issue, I’ll be able to reenable some, if not all, of my conlang apps for your future enjoyment! Be sure to watch this space for news!!

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Frankly, the entire website is so old and out of date and willfully not maintained that I’m surprised there’s any traffic to it.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 Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s birthday.

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. Hemingway snuck off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.

After his parents got tired of him hanging around, he started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, including Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafés, but he wrote every day.

His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, Sun Also Rises. Three years later, Farewell To Arms came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive. He developed cancer and, in true “Hemingway hero” fashion, killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. But, by then, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.

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.

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!)

Today is Ernest “Papa” Hemingway’s birthday.

He was born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. Hemingway snuck off to fight in World War I when he was just 17. He had bad eyesight, so he volunteered as an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. Just about a month after he got to Italy, he was hit by shrapnel from an exploding shell. He spent weeks in the hospital and then came back home to his parents in Oak Park.

After his parents got tired of him hanging around, he started writing stories for Chicago newspapers and magazines, and then got a job as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and went off to Paris with his wife Hadley. He became friends with a lot of writers who were in Paris at the time, including Fitzgerald and Joyce and Pound and Gertrude Stein. And he wrote every day, sometimes in his apartment, sometimes in cafés, but he wrote every day.

His first collection of short stories, In Our Time, came out in 1925 and the following year, his first big success, Sun Also Rises. Three years later, Farewell To Arms came out. By the 1930s, he was one of the best-known writers alive. He developed cancer and, in true “Hemingway hero” fashion, killed himself with a shotgun in 1961. But, by then, he was one of the most recognizable people on the planet.