Fantasist's Scroll

For pity’s sake, READ THE POST!

Okay, now I’ve gotten a whole bunch of people asking me to help them write out Elvish words or phrases in one of Tolkien’s various Elvish scripts. I’m going to say this one more time for you all: I do not know how to write in any elvish script whatsoever! I only care about Tolkien’s languages for the fact that he made them himself and used them to create an amazing world about which he wrote wonderful stories. I do not know how to speak or write in any form of Sindarin, Quenya, Tengwar or any other of his langauges. What’s more, I have no desire to do so. I will not write them in a box. I will not speak them for a fox!

However, if you do want help, the fine purveyor of many things Elvish at Gildor’s Page seems fairly willing to help. You can see some of the work done already at this page: Tengwar in Reality. So, go ask them!

And, that’s all I’m going to mention on that subject again. (I hope!)

I’ve always been fascinated with Japanese.

Mainly due to a fascination with the martial arts, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish. In any case, I have several links for you fellow Japanophiles. First, there’s Japanese for the Western Mind. It looks like a good place to start. Of course, I’m biased, I have a Western Mind! And, also there’s The Japanese Language, which is not quite as comprehesnive as it sounds! Though it does look like an excellent second stop for the amateur linguist.
And, lastly, I have a vocabulary builder: the Philippi Martial Arts Glossary page. It’s actually got more than Japanese terms on it, so it might be usefull to conlangers, as well.

In any case, these looked like fun sites to me, but then I’ve been sick, so, what the hell, it’s Friday! Go check them out!

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!

Well, I’m making a bit.

After a couple of exchanges on the Conlang List this week, I realized that I’m growing as a person, and a writer. As the reference to conlanging suggests, I’ve been thinking about created languages again. I was originall inspired by an article in the Dragon Magazine in the days of my youth. It was a very simplistic article aimed at a simple person, namely me and my kind. It was followed by another article which was much more linguistically challenging and completely over my head. That was almost 20 years ago. Just three years ago, that second article was still over my head.
But, then I started reading. I read the conlang list and several groups on Yahoo. I read LangMaker.com and The Metaverse. More importantly, I got several books on linguistics and read them, too. I reread that article which had flummoxed me so many years ago this weekend and the whole damn thing made sense. I’m finally ready to start conlanging again after 20 years.

Look out, Johnny, here I come!

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.

You may have noticed a change here at Fantasist.net.

Namely, the fact that there are now advertisements. Well, frankly, it just can’t be helped anymore. So far, in over five years of having this site, less than ten people have bought books from my Amazon.com store, no one has bought anything from the CafePress store, no one has bought anything for me from my Wishlist and no one has donated any money. It’s not cheap to run the place and costs keep going up, so I finally decided that I had to host some small ads. Hopefully, they’re not too intrusive, but they’re here to stay. I may move them around some, but I’m fairly certain that I’ll always have them from now on.
I actually got the idea from Langmaker.com, run by Jeff Henning. He has a few, very tasteful, ads on the side of his site now. And, knowing what I know about the web and costs and such, I don’t begrudge him any of the tiny revenue he must take in from it.

So, now you know.

This is a bit of a personal issue, really.

Okay, since I’ve been reading stuff online about the ocean, and posting about it, too, for a change, this seemed appropriate. I’ve found a tool to help me maintain good seafood consumption, namely, Seafood Watch at the Monterrey Bay Aquarium. It’s a list, or series of lists, of safe, sustainable seafood reccomendations. There are several pocket “cards” here in PDF format that you can print out and take with you to restraunts and shopping. Each card has three categories: Safe, Warning, and Danger. And each has an explanation of why the various fish were put in their categories.
The population is growing at such an amazing rate that I think we, as an entire race, need to look at how we manage our resources. Toward that end, farming fish and being carefull to consume sustainable fish just plain makes sense. It may end up being the world’s last, best, source of protien.

Noticed something different?

Yeah, I’ve gotten so much comment spam that I had to turn off comments on the blog. Frankly, that’s a shame because I liked getting the occasional comment from my three readers. Ah, well, such is life. Maybe when I change to a new blog system, they’ll be better about blocking comment spam.

I can only hope.