Where whims and dreams blend into reality...
A very short "worldspoiler primer" for Tyrian in the spirit of the Stablehand one. It's much less polished and more like a thoughtdump, but it gets all the important stuff and new ideas I had lately in. See also my Tyrian page at the top.
Again, the whole "if you don't want ANY spoilers this is not for you" thing. You've been warned. :p
So, the other day, I got an interesting new idea for Tenkai, or what I'm now tentatively calling The Kai Project. With as many times as I've re-imagined this thing, though, I feel like I'd better stop and recap all the previous things it's been, for the sake of everyone's sanity including mine.
Later I revisited the whole idea and redid some of the creatures from both the AoK stage and the weeaboo Tenkai stage more realistically. The project's basic blueprint was fairly similar to that at the weeaboo stage including the breeds idea, but also brought back the "element evolutions" idea from AoK to create them (creatures also had juvenile forms). There were a number of habitat biome types or "attributes", and monsters had variants each tagged with a different attribute or attributes. Each attribute would have certain types of abilities it would tend to have, and there was some idea though I never figured it out concretely of having each attribute be good in a certain range of other biomes and against monsters from those biomes like how real life species can often be all right in more than one biome if the biomes are similar enough.
(All the previous bullets are in more context here.)
The monsterverse idea happened. That didn't really change anything about the project except possibly make it part of something of a much bigger scope.
(Note: the monsterverse idea has a fairly good chance of staying into the final project as long as I don't abandon the idea of a Takumi monstergame entirely, given I've found somebody who independently had basically the exact same idea to talk to about it with.)
For a long time I'd been wanting a nice and minimal but also relatively quality place to archive Stablehand pictures. deviantART was kinda okay, but its expectation you enter a bunch of metadata for every single one including "artist comments" and also had no way of changing the file to a different format after uploading was a drag. Tumblr was pretty all right, but hard to browse through well, and its photosets were very idiosyncratic (I'll still be posting updates there though). Also because of javascript weirdness and firebug glitches sometimes editing posts took forever.
archive.org seemed great at first because its purpose was to be an internet library and archive things for a long time—what better place to archive things, right? And to be fair, it was a great place to put fullsizes and won bonus points with me by providing a CCO licence tag. But it basically sucked for actually displaying any of the pictures in a remotely organised fashion, extremely surprising especially when its audio pages and game archive both got a recent revamp to look beautiful. So here comes the next step.
Recently I randomly found out about a new set of projects to create something called the federated internet when reading an article on opensource.com. Big shoutout to opensource.com! You helped me discover something I honestly think is going to be really awesome.
Anyway, the idea behind the federated internet is that there are going to be a number of projects available as alternatives to popular web apps, but they're going to be built on libre open source platforms, and there's going to be a strong standard of individual freedom and privacy. Federated web apps will be made of pods, different locations that each run the site independently but intercommunicate such that you can register on one pod and store data there and communicate with other pods without thinking about it (meaning it's vastly less easy to get any significant number of users' data at once, and maybe less traffic congestion), and if your pod threatens to go out for some reason, you can clone your stuff to a different one. diaspora* (aka libre Facebook :p), GNU social (aka libre twitter), and pump.io (aka distinctly different libre twitter), are the main examples that exist right now. But there are more things in progress! Though it's not a 'federated web' thing per se, libre.fm (a libre music site I use a lot) is based on the same "open platform you can build a clone/compatible site with" idea, and also, to finally finally get to the point of these two long paragraphs, there's mediagoblin.
What mediagoblin is supposed to be is a unified platform for uploading and displaying a whole bunch of types of media—instead of using a million different services for sound and pictures and video and 3d models and pdfs and... you get the picture, mediagoblin is supposed to give you ONE convenient media gallery. You can use it on a public site, or you can set up your own site running it and customise the heck out of it. I wish I could do the latter because that would be awesome (it would definitely be fun to make a FolderView skin to go with the new theme of this site), but I opted to do the former because I don't really have my own web space to do that with, haha. Eventually it will be federated, though it isn't right now (there are about two unlinked "pods" at the moment though).
Anyway the new Stablehand picture archive is at https://goblinrefuge.com/mediagoblin/u/sougonnatakumi/!
(Mediagoblin is fairly early and imperfect right now, as you might notice immediately from my page "description" where I've copied the gallery links onto the main page where they should be (:p), but I have serious confidence the platform will improve, as I know for a fact there are people working hard to improve it.)
So as you may or may not know, I've had a specific approach on Stablehand up to now.
There's a good bit I haven't told you, and a lot more things I've told you about but haven't actually explained [...]. I'm trying as much as I can to only tell you things the main characters or other relatively ordinary people already know.
I have discovered that while this makes for a great story, it is a horrible way to gain fans and feedback in the early stages.
And so comes the worldspoiler primer. In it I'm basically going to
give up on trying to pretend I can pull off the "mysterious world is mysterious gee I wonder what the explanation for that could be wow what is up with that" thing [...] and (without changing my plans for the actual story), just start by telling people all the background like in a conventional story
I will assume nothing in this. I'm literally gonna start from zero, apart from especially clear tumblr posts I've made. And I'm gonna go up to everything I have figured out but actual current story plot of the actual main character stories (partly because they're all in a bunch of little vague pieces in my mind anyway).
Obviously if you're the kind of person who doesn't want any spoilers or doesn't like to see worldbuilding explained all the way through before it's relevant, this is not for you. My about tag(s) might be a better place for you to learn about the story. But if you wanna know what's up with Stablehand and its world and/or help me on it, and don't mind background spoilers, I recommend you read it.
With that said, let's get started. ~10500 words follow.
A friend of mine was musing about pronouns and creating new ones lately. Namely, about what would sound the least awkward but most fitting in each inflection. As this was happening, I was like, why isn't there a place where you can just type in pronouns and have a passage change so you can see how awkward (or not) they sound?? So, I decided to make one.
Of course, writing sample passages with a focus on pronouns is hard, so I fell back to what I knew best: eldritch nonbinary birdpeople. Pay it no mind. You have a pronoun tester now. :p
Ingenious examined the illuminated ceiling. She'd never seen its likes before, and her plumes ruffled with uncertainty.
A stately creature, few could top the simple splendour that was hers. But her grace showed much better in familiar situations; even the likes of her were no match for this. One even less composed than she might well have shattered.
She steadied herself. Who assists a specially tuned avian from the outer reaches when she's not ready for prime time? If she wants to make it through this, the slick feathered figure reasoned, that problem is hers alone right now. She'll just have to throw herself into gear.
| Subject | Object | Possessive determiner | Possessive | Reflexive |
| Would | Will | Is/Are | ||