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IdeasExperiments in various realms, mostly linguistic. I have a lot of spare brain time. A lot. A good chunk of that goes into programming projects, but there's a considerable amount that's ultimately destined for elsewhere. A lot of the time that means it goes every which way, clogging up the world with random sheets of paper covered in half-baked ideas, but sometimes it fits under a remotely cohesive header, and when it does the result is generally something worth putting here. Of course, it couldn't just be something totally random. Most of what I spend my time on I've been able to group into a fairly distinctive category or two. The predominant strain in this department is decidedly universe creation; the drive to take everything ever and make an alternative rule-set out of it. From physics to literary canon, eventually I'll analyse everything and have such a ridiculously comprehensive universe that it'll be worth reading about. In any case, however, all of this stuff exists, so here it is. Most of the projects are oriented or at least connected to linguistics at present. There are two universes I've worked on to date, with a few language projects that fit under neither. The first is Danizok, the name of a star with several planets. It consumed my years in middle school with a number of overly-ambitious projects that ultimately yielded plans for at least five major civilisations with their own histories, languages and writing systems—one of which was suitable for a fairly standard D&D game, the rest of which were distinctly utopian S/F to such an extent that adventuring wasn't exactly necessary, though they had their shares of rocky pasts. Danizok ultimately yielded only a couple of things of note: the K'radénalla lexicon and writing system, which brought me face to face with the reality that grammatical sentences are really hard. It also yielded the Dalian writing system, which is a pseudo-syllabary that came about through my own shortage of understanding for writing systems at the time: characters can represent strings of phonemes of any length (from one consonant or vowel up to three or four syllables), and merge into syllables completely on a contextual basis—unquestionably an amateurish experiment, but one I have some pride for as it allows for a great amount of flexibility and could easily absorb other writing systems without consequence. After I became disillusioned with the goals I'd set forth in Danizok, I drifted around for a while with a language experiment called Kn, with different editions being described as K1, K2, and K3. This was my first complete language, based on a crude understanding of the mechanics of Greek and Latin and some very meticulous analysis of English text. I even got as far as writing a short textbook for it; the dictionary is lacking, but the grammar is extremely flexible, ostensibly complete, and based on no natural languages as far as I know. I made some attempts to rework Kn; it gained an alphabet and some planned extensions for a synthetic vocabulary, and I started on a grammar for an improved version (with more traditional and closer to monolithic declensions and conjugations) called Refortea, but this was abandoned. It has a writing system called RTFS-01 which is completely systematic. The second universe is Thet, which has evolved several times and now will be fated to be more grandiose than IRDU, but with dear Catherine's help all of this should be possible. So far in Thet there are at least two races, the Lilitai and the Lyrisclensia, both strangers to the broken underworld, and one language, Lilitic (so named by the Earth-based archaeologists who found Thet, and not actually unique to the Lilitai.) It's grown out of a much more mature understanding of civilisations and languages, and will probably be something fairly epic. A writing system for Lilitic, called Satiny-L, has already been created and made functional. The ambitions for Lilitic are high, however, and there are plans for an extension to the language that to my knowledge has never been done systematically before: a complete and non-ritualistic magic system, which is likely to resemble verbal assembly programming that gives the universe instructions on how to control and manipulate the world. Amongst other potential benefits of this system is a great deal of ease-of-implementation: it could be possible to revolutionise magic systems in video games and RPGs by building in such systems; then would-be magic users would actually have to know how to use magic! (Since there are already input devices such as the Wiimote and various 3D mice that allow for decent emulation of blades and firearms, it seems only fair.) Now, of course, Thet had to be discovered by someone. For that, another universe was conceived—Catherine's Inkspill Pharmaceutical Corporation, which has now grown into a webcomic wherein Thet can be expected to be explored. You can see that here. My notes about Inkspill on this site are going to be just a few notes and plans. Anyway, here's a summary and a more complete list in case you missed any of that: ThetA lot more information on Thet is available at its official site at Inkspill.
Miscellaneous
Inkspill
Danizok
Argument ClinicFinally, after everything else, we get to the place where miscellaneous ideas, discussions and bones of contention go. It is surprisingly like the Python (Monty) sketch of the same name.
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