Fantasist's Scroll

“Now, Jim will wrestle the wild book, while I stand here sipping tea in safety.”

Remember Wild Kingdom? Where poor Jim had to wrestle the deadly anaconda, while Marlon Perkins stayed all nice and safe with the camera crew? Remember Jacques Cousteau chasing the “wiley and elusive” sea creature of the moment? Well, now you can watch books in the wild, too. Okay, that was a goofy lead-in to this, but bear with me.
While I was looking for something else on the Internet the other day, I came accross something called BookCrossing. It’s a simple concept, really. Just mark a book with information about the service, register it on their website, then, set the book loose “in the wild”. Now, as people read the book, they sign into the website and journal about it. They might review it or just talk about where they found it or whatever. Then, they pass it on to another person or location. Rinse, repeat. So it goes, ad infinitum, supposedly. I have to admit, it might be an interesting experiment to try. I wonder where the book might travel and who might read it. Following a book like that might make for some interesting fiction, too. The Life and Travels of a Book

Well, whatever, I thought it was cool, so I decided to share. Enjoy!

Can an artist do more than survive?

I’ve often wondered if I could survive as an artist. Of course, I’ve often wondered if I am an artist at all. But, once upon a midnight dreary, I was a fairly good writer. I had a sense of the art that’s involved with writing. In fact, I think I turned out a fairly good piece, or two, that could have sold. Ah, and therein lies the rub, “could have sold”. If I’d kept submitting them, or reworked them again and again, or just wrote more, something “could have sold”. Instead, crass commercialism took over instead and I focused on making money. That took me into another field altogether. In fact, it lead me to get a technical certification and dive deep into the uncharted waters of IT industry. And, my art, such as it was, suffered for it.

So, during one holiday dinner, as I sat in a cold-medicine and Scotch haze, listening to relatives, mostly my wife’s family, chatter away about their lives and careers, I began to wonder why my professional life had become somewhat “lack-luster”. I found myself wondering what would have happened if I’d only followed through on the promise of my writing. Would I have become a Clive Barker? Or, a Frank Herbert? Somehow, I doubt it. But, still, I might have made a living at it. Mightn’t I? I mean, can one actually make a living at writing if one is not a Clive Barker or a Michael Crighton? Is it even possible? I’d like to think so, but I’m afraid that it’s not.
I think that is the pipe-dream that fed so many of us as we sat in our English classes or read Interview with a Vampire or did whatever we did that set us dreaming of literary greatness. But, honestly, I don’t think it’s possible anymore. I don’t think that a normal person living in our possession-oriented society could actually be satisfied with a writer’s salary. Maybe a Buddhist monk, but not a normal American boy like me.

But, you know, I think I’ll keep trying. Why? Because it sure beats the alternatives!

Ever wanted to have a blog recorded in Shire Reckoning?

How about Islamic dates? Well, now, you can do just that in MovableType thanks to my CustomDates plugin. I started with code from a plugin done by zumaidi and posted on the MovableType Support boards. Then, I added a CPAN module by Tom Braun for calculating the date according to Shire Reckoning.

As far as I can tell, no one has done this before. Not sure why no one’s done anything sooner, but I was totally dissatisfied with the lack of a custom date feature in MovableType. Luckily for me, one of the better features of MT is that it’s extendable with PERL. So, I put this little baby together. It’s not perfect, but it does a fairly good job. I still need to make some improvements and add in some more date systems, like Hebrew and the Forgotten Realms, but it’s good enough to release now, I think.
You can see and example of it running at my test blog. Of course, as I add and test new features, that test blog will change a bit.

Enjoy!

I see a disturbing trend…

I spent a little too much quality time on a conlang BBS this week. Well, it’s not a real BBS, but it’s one of those new-fangled, PHP-based web-BBS things. I hate them. I much, much prefer the old-fashioned e-mail list or newsgroup.
Anyway, I got all wrapped up in a discussion about the virtues, or lack thereof, in automated word generators. It started with someone reccomending my old generator, which is really based on code from Chris Pound. Well, someone complained that it would be nice to be able to specify the phonology of the words to be generated. So I worked for several months at PERL and finally coded up my Conlang Wordmaker, which will look really familiar to people who have used Langmaker. Well, when I posted that, it sparked a number of things, but one person made the comment that they “damn well would never use a word generator” to make their conlang. Well, that sort of irritated me. And, when I get irritated before my morning coffee, I tend to type rather sharp replies.

But, sharp replies aside, what’s wrong with using a word generator? I mean, a piece of beautiful furnature that was assembled with power tools isn’t any less beautiful, is it? Is something done by hand, in the slowest, hardest way possible, inherently more worthy of praise? I don’t think so, but apparently quite a few conlangers do seem to think so. And, as I’ve poked around the web, it seems to be a sentiment that conlang people in general have taken to be a Universal Truth. But, why?

I think it’s because so many of them are, or were, linguists or linguistics students. Academia is anchored to a rigid system of learning that tends to insist people follow certain patterns. I have a college degree, but most of what I know that I truly prize, I learned on my own far, far away from a classroom. I think far outside the box that academia tends to force scholarship into. For instance, in learning things like PERL, I learned that whichever way works, is a good enough way. Sure, there may be other ways, but if it works, it’s good enough way. So, too, in my “day job”. I manage servers in a corporate envrionment, so I often don’t have time to find the “best” way. I have to make it work, usually on a budget, quickly. I apply that maxim everywhere in my life.
So, how does that relate to conlanging? Well, I’m not really too hung up on phonology or morphology. I don’t care to spend hours upon hours making a rigid, highly technical scheme of phonology and morphology. It matters more to me how the language sounds. If I’m looking for something that sounds a little bit like Cantonese as spoken by a Polyneasean, what difference does it make how the words are formed? All that matters is that I get my end result, a conlang that sounds right.

I’m not in favor of form over function. I never have been. For most things, I’d rather it get done quick and dirty than never get done at all. So, I’m in favor of using whatever tools get the job done for a conlang. I don’t care if you steal words from a natural language and “mutate” them into a new conlang. Do whatever it takes to make a language that adds that realism to your fiction! What matters isn’t the process, but the art that you create!

This is a variation on last week’s script, but it’s still petty cool.

Last week, I released a script that lets you specify your own phonology This week, I’ve added a variation on that generator. This one not only lets you choose your own phonology, but it lets you automatically translate a short list of words into your new conlang! I’ve listed enough words for a short naming language, but you can change those for ones that you’d prefer. Whew! That’s four conlang scripts in four weeks!! That’s enough for a bit, I think. And, it should be enough to get you folks started on your own language, so, go have fun!

Not real practical, but fun!

Hate those boring, old jewel cases? Always loosing your CD-ROM envelopes? Just looking for a way to carry CDs that’s cheap, easy and sort of cool?
Then the Paper CD Case is for you!

It’s pretty cool, actually. There’s a form that lets you customize your CD case with song tracks and titles and such. There are folding instructions, but they’re listed on a separate page, so you have to read all the instructions before you customize your CD case. Fun stuff for a Friday, though! Enjoy!

This is a totally new script.

Last week, I released a variation on the first conlang generator on my site. This week, I’m turning loose a script that lets you specify your own phonology. That’s both the word construction “patterns” and the actual phonological units that go into them. So now, you can make words that are based on your own ideas of phonological construction and not rely on existing languages. There’ll be more next week, but in the mean time, go have fun!

This is the second new script.

Last week, I re-released my Conlang Word Generator in a limited version. This week, I’ve added a variation on that generator. This version lets you use your own source lexicon! So, if you wanted to make more words that were similar to your own, hand-crafted conlang, all you have to do is copy and paste words from that conlang into the input section and click the button. Presto! More words in the same style as your conlang. Or, at least, similar to your conlang. So, now, you don’t need to rely on my choice of datasets. Go have fun!