Michael Curtis over at the Society of Torch, Pole and Rope recently posted on a nifty little program that can turn your own handwriting into a usable font for your computer, making those little kustom details on your handouts that much easier to tweak to satisfaction.
In that regard, I'd like to share a dirty little secret: I've never used custom fonts for my handouts. Or, indeed, much of anything. As a rather fresh GM, I have primarily run Dark Heresy, a system built on the old Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay rules but set in the universe of Warhammer 40,000. In that setting, I've personally gotten very good results simply typing up my documents in Notepad, which gives a very retro-technological, bureaucratic, somewhat clunky feel to the text. I started using it as much out of convenience and lack of a proper word processor on my computer as anything else, but later I started receiving compliments from my players on the quality of the handouts, specifically the font.
So, there you have my dirty, little secret: Notepad. It makes a pretty fine Imperial font - simple, free, and preinstalled. Just watch the spacing; line wrap-arounds aren't pretty.
Dec 3, 2009
Why Learn a Second Language? - part 1
Some of my enormous and devoted horde of readers (disclaimer: Since human beings consist of multiple organisms, and several partake in the undertaking of reading, it has been scientifically determined that a single human reader constitutes a "horde") may wonder why one should go to the effort of attaining a second language. Først og fremst fordi hvis ingen gjorde dette, ville denne bloggen se slik ut, and secondly, because it is a mind-expanding experience.
How so?
Well, any new language you learn is likely to include a vast amount of words for concepts that do not even exist in your mind yet. As you're reading this, you are already familiar with English, one of the languages with the largest vocabularies in the world, but this doesn't mean that there exists such a thing as a language without new concepts to explore.
Below followeth a partial list of a few examples, which I will update as I recall new ones. Keep in mind that the bdelow are only very rough translations:
overimorgen - the day after tomorrow
forigårs - the day before yesterday
døgn - 24-hour period, on Earth, or the local equivalent cycle
stusselig - this is to a situation what a "loser" is to an individual. That's a very rough summary, so I'll give you two examples: "Stusselig" is celebrating Christmas without your family, or being 87 while your wife/husband died at 60
hyggelig - part of a subset of Norwegian terms which translate as "nice". This particular one means "nice in a socially inviting way". "Koselig" means "nice, as in lacking hostile qualities", or as in "cute and fuzzy in a metaphorical way". "Trivelig" means "nice in a manner which fosters mental well-being".
kassere - quite simply to throw something away as garbage
orke - nope, nothing to do with orcs. "Orke" means "can be bothered to, has the energy to, or feels up the the task of".
fag - subject or area of specializations, used both vocationally and for subjects at school
skare - a layer of ice on top of snow, which can be of any thickness or strength as long as it still looks like snow. (One of my father's favorite sayings: "When the skare carries a man at St. John's Eve, the spring will be late".)
lumsk - insidiously creepy and malevolently sneaky
In return, Norwegian e.g. has no word for "cookie", having to make do "biscuit" or "small cake", or just borrowing the word "cookie".
How so?
Well, any new language you learn is likely to include a vast amount of words for concepts that do not even exist in your mind yet. As you're reading this, you are already familiar with English, one of the languages with the largest vocabularies in the world, but this doesn't mean that there exists such a thing as a language without new concepts to explore.
Below followeth a partial list of a few examples, which I will update as I recall new ones. Keep in mind that the bdelow are only very rough translations:
overimorgen - the day after tomorrow
forigårs - the day before yesterday
døgn - 24-hour period, on Earth, or the local equivalent cycle
stusselig - this is to a situation what a "loser" is to an individual. That's a very rough summary, so I'll give you two examples: "Stusselig" is celebrating Christmas without your family, or being 87 while your wife/husband died at 60
hyggelig - part of a subset of Norwegian terms which translate as "nice". This particular one means "nice in a socially inviting way". "Koselig" means "nice, as in lacking hostile qualities", or as in "cute and fuzzy in a metaphorical way". "Trivelig" means "nice in a manner which fosters mental well-being".
kassere - quite simply to throw something away as garbage
orke - nope, nothing to do with orcs. "Orke" means "can be bothered to, has the energy to, or feels up the the task of".
fag - subject or area of specializations, used both vocationally and for subjects at school
skare - a layer of ice on top of snow, which can be of any thickness or strength as long as it still looks like snow. (One of my father's favorite sayings: "When the skare carries a man at St. John's Eve, the spring will be late".)
lumsk - insidiously creepy and malevolently sneaky
In return, Norwegian e.g. has no word for "cookie", having to make do "biscuit" or "small cake", or just borrowing the word "cookie".
D&D Oddity - Water Pool
In the D&D 3.5 Monster Manual 2, there's a type of monster called an "Elemental Weird". These come in ye standarde four elemental flavours, each type keeping residence in a separate type of elemental pool. These are described in meticulous detail. Here's an excerpt from the text on the Water Weird's pool:
(Hint: Humans consist mostly of water, and interact with it on a daily basis.)
Water Pool: This pool is filled with bubbling, swirling water. Any creature within it that cannot breathe water immediately begins to drown (see The Drowning Rules in Chapter 3 of the Dungeon Master's Guide). Any creature without the ability to swim cannot move through water, except by falling. A water weird's pool may be affixed only to a horizontal surface, and it may appear only in a right side up position (such as on the floor of a cavern).I kid you not. In describing an elemental creature, they found it necessary to describe the completely ordinary pool of water in which it lives, complete with the basic properties of normal water. Why is this unnecessary? 10 points to the first person to come up with the right answer...
(Hint: Humans consist mostly of water, and interact with it on a daily basis.)
Language Changes - The Amusing Part
Ok, so we all know that "gay" had... slightly different connotations back in antiquity, when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and "computer games" meant acting like one. But more than just that changed:
Now, that is one confounding mistake. I mean, anybody, anybody a-tall, would immediately realize that that's not a red costume. What happened? Didn't they proofread? Did the colours get screwed up in printing?Well, no. Language changed, that's what happened. See, in the merry Old Time(tm), that colour was red. Pink only became a recognized primary colour later in the 20th century - my guess would be the late 70's or early 80's. Sure, somebody from that time might describe the costume as "pink", but they'd likely be doing so in the same manner that we nowadays might describe the green one as "emerald". Pink was a flower, which gave its name to a particular shade of red, which then became recognized as a primary colour.
This leads me to the following conclusion: Don't be hatin' on the pink. It, too, fought long and hard for its rights, and only won them in the late 20th century. It's still discriminated against.
(Note: I'm not pink, just supportive. Well, my skin is kinda pink-ish, but no conclusions can be drawn from that. Not that I'm colourist - some of my best friends are pink. I just wouldn't want my non-existent hypothetical daughter to marry the colour.)
[Picture from Superdickery.com]
Dec 2, 2009
Order of the Stick: Book 4 announced
The fourth/sixth installment of my very favourite comic, titled Don't Split The Party is available for preorder. Finally. Now, to save up some money...
And don't spoil me! I'm one of those weirdoes who wait for the print version.
Only one question remains: Why pink?
And don't spoil me! I'm one of those weirdoes who wait for the print version.
Only one question remains: Why pink?
Nov 29, 2009
The Paradigm of Self
Chances are you've seen this video:
Chances are you've seen it, because chances are you are either somebody I've told about this page in real life, or that you came here because I linked to your blog. If I linked to your blog, you blog about the kind of stuff that would lend itself naturally to having seen it, and if I told you about it, you're a person I'd want to see this and whom I'd believe to be interested in this kind of stuff, and thus there's a chance you might've seen it. At this point, I've linked twice and told two people about it. Chances are I'll get one single view for this post within this year. Never say never, but more is improbable.
How you came across this post is of little consequence. You might have followed a link here, you might have Google'd me, you might have come across a reference to my blog in the Wayback Machine or whatever equivalent will exist in the nebulously defined future. You might be viewing a hardcopy, freshly printed or stumbled across in some dusty attic years after the timedate stamp. You might even have come across it during historical or archaeological studies in some form. That is not the point. The point is you found it. It has served its purpose.
Its purpose? To be read. By you. By anyone. Years ago, before the dawn of the internet, before the first monitor flickered on, before the first spark flew through the first vacuum tube, bringing the first computer to life - a harbinger of things to come, like a butterfly carried on the breeze before the storm of its own creation - an identity had to be maintained face-to-face. An identity only existed, in those early days, to the extent that you communicated it to others, and after you died, your identity lived on only in memory. Then came writing. Writing changed the paradigm of self in a way never before since the very idea of self was founded in the very first language. Now, an identity could be forged - carefully built up and maintained through letters and writings. Suddenly, the dead never quite died - Hammurabi lives, inasmuch as his Code can still be read. Without writing...
The census came. Names and information systematically recorded, ostensibly for the benefit of rulers of historians, but really, they benefitted the individual - for how else could the names of the people of ancient China - the most basic particle of identity, otherwise completely forgotten by now - have been preserved?
Even the census, however, was not enough to fully preserve the self. an identity can only exist so long as a personality can be assigned to it. Personality, in many - but not all - ways, is interchangable with identity. Autobiographies also came into being at some point, another way to preserve an identity after death brings the identitee into non-existence. Still, how many of the world's literate population ever wrote an autobiography, and how many had biographies written about them by others? For every 100 biographies on Hitler. a million souls are left without any biography at all.
Cometh the internet, the true topic of this post. In the beginning, the net was small - limited. Only available to students and faculty of a minute set of institutions of learning within the United States, the netizens of this early period forged their online identities as an extension of their normal ones, in digitized versions of everyday face-to-face interaction. Mailing lists and the basic forms behind what we now know as chats and forums, as well as the first few online games, led to an environment where a three-minute conversation with one's classmates regarding bacon could now be recalled perfectly a year later, and quoted. It was clear that this changed the rules of interaction, but not how. 1993 came, and with it the Eternal September.
The Eternal September influx led to a mass-scale proliferation of home pages. Originally, these were basically facts sheets about the netizens - short "My name is, born in, interested in, studying/working as" blurbs - and special-interests pages, such as "How to grow the perfect hortensia". These merged, leading to multiple-page sites with a great variety of content. But, for all the newfound freedom of publishing these pages offered, they were still ultimately static, with cumbersome formatting and coding making adding content a needless chore. Further, I suspect the idea that such a page wasn't "finished" once the article on hortensia growing was written was still strange. As a book or a newspaper doesn't change, I believe the original home pages may have been regarded as such, too.
Enter the Web 2.0.
The home page is basically dead. Some still exist, but the format is still cumbersome, despite new tools having been released, and it is also expensive. More and more, devoted web pages are the purview of groups, mainly of the commercial and/or informational types, and individuals.. what?
Well, the individuals have moved on- I guess MySpace should have been a warning sign. We moved on, to social networking pages, MMOs and the blogosphere. We now forge our identities in a new way. We now combine the best of writing and the socialization-based kind of identity-creation, leaving us with a living and ever-growing network of people which nevertheless allows for near-instant, effortless and flawless recall of whatever is desired, as well as the nice bonus it is to allow the use of sound, video and pictures in normal interaction - from smilies to the one embedded below.
We are not the same as we were. We are now digital creatures, co-existing within the spheres of the internet and real-life, forging permanent and lasting identities in a brave new world. The development hasn't stopped. The evolution doesn't end here. It may, in fact, still be accelerating. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Many parts of society have still to catch up to this. In particular, old forms of copy-control and intellectual property management are rendered not only obsolete, but near-impossible to enforce, a topic on which Shamus Young is much more eloquent than I.
As we prepare for the dawn of a new decade, one thing is clear:
We have to rethink some things.
If you read all that, you're a hero.
Chances are you've seen it, because chances are you are either somebody I've told about this page in real life, or that you came here because I linked to your blog. If I linked to your blog, you blog about the kind of stuff that would lend itself naturally to having seen it, and if I told you about it, you're a person I'd want to see this and whom I'd believe to be interested in this kind of stuff, and thus there's a chance you might've seen it. At this point, I've linked twice and told two people about it. Chances are I'll get one single view for this post within this year. Never say never, but more is improbable.
How you came across this post is of little consequence. You might have followed a link here, you might have Google'd me, you might have come across a reference to my blog in the Wayback Machine or whatever equivalent will exist in the nebulously defined future. You might be viewing a hardcopy, freshly printed or stumbled across in some dusty attic years after the timedate stamp. You might even have come across it during historical or archaeological studies in some form. That is not the point. The point is you found it. It has served its purpose.
Its purpose? To be read. By you. By anyone. Years ago, before the dawn of the internet, before the first monitor flickered on, before the first spark flew through the first vacuum tube, bringing the first computer to life - a harbinger of things to come, like a butterfly carried on the breeze before the storm of its own creation - an identity had to be maintained face-to-face. An identity only existed, in those early days, to the extent that you communicated it to others, and after you died, your identity lived on only in memory. Then came writing. Writing changed the paradigm of self in a way never before since the very idea of self was founded in the very first language. Now, an identity could be forged - carefully built up and maintained through letters and writings. Suddenly, the dead never quite died - Hammurabi lives, inasmuch as his Code can still be read. Without writing...
The census came. Names and information systematically recorded, ostensibly for the benefit of rulers of historians, but really, they benefitted the individual - for how else could the names of the people of ancient China - the most basic particle of identity, otherwise completely forgotten by now - have been preserved?
Even the census, however, was not enough to fully preserve the self. an identity can only exist so long as a personality can be assigned to it. Personality, in many - but not all - ways, is interchangable with identity. Autobiographies also came into being at some point, another way to preserve an identity after death brings the identitee into non-existence. Still, how many of the world's literate population ever wrote an autobiography, and how many had biographies written about them by others? For every 100 biographies on Hitler. a million souls are left without any biography at all.
Cometh the internet, the true topic of this post. In the beginning, the net was small - limited. Only available to students and faculty of a minute set of institutions of learning within the United States, the netizens of this early period forged their online identities as an extension of their normal ones, in digitized versions of everyday face-to-face interaction. Mailing lists and the basic forms behind what we now know as chats and forums, as well as the first few online games, led to an environment where a three-minute conversation with one's classmates regarding bacon could now be recalled perfectly a year later, and quoted. It was clear that this changed the rules of interaction, but not how. 1993 came, and with it the Eternal September.
The Eternal September influx led to a mass-scale proliferation of home pages. Originally, these were basically facts sheets about the netizens - short "My name is, born in, interested in, studying/working as" blurbs - and special-interests pages, such as "How to grow the perfect hortensia". These merged, leading to multiple-page sites with a great variety of content. But, for all the newfound freedom of publishing these pages offered, they were still ultimately static, with cumbersome formatting and coding making adding content a needless chore. Further, I suspect the idea that such a page wasn't "finished" once the article on hortensia growing was written was still strange. As a book or a newspaper doesn't change, I believe the original home pages may have been regarded as such, too.
Enter the Web 2.0.
The home page is basically dead. Some still exist, but the format is still cumbersome, despite new tools having been released, and it is also expensive. More and more, devoted web pages are the purview of groups, mainly of the commercial and/or informational types, and individuals.. what?
Well, the individuals have moved on- I guess MySpace should have been a warning sign. We moved on, to social networking pages, MMOs and the blogosphere. We now forge our identities in a new way. We now combine the best of writing and the socialization-based kind of identity-creation, leaving us with a living and ever-growing network of people which nevertheless allows for near-instant, effortless and flawless recall of whatever is desired, as well as the nice bonus it is to allow the use of sound, video and pictures in normal interaction - from smilies to the one embedded below.
We are not the same as we were. We are now digital creatures, co-existing within the spheres of the internet and real-life, forging permanent and lasting identities in a brave new world. The development hasn't stopped. The evolution doesn't end here. It may, in fact, still be accelerating. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Many parts of society have still to catch up to this. In particular, old forms of copy-control and intellectual property management are rendered not only obsolete, but near-impossible to enforce, a topic on which Shamus Young is much more eloquent than I.
As we prepare for the dawn of a new decade, one thing is clear:
We have to rethink some things.
If you read all that, you're a hero.
While We're At It - The Alexandrian
A sadly seldomly-updated page, The Alexandrian, by the redoubtable Justin Alexander, is a page that focuses mainly on theatre - which is not my cup of tea - book reviews, and very deep, in-depth analyses of RPG design. It is fascinating and very well-written - less straight-out funny than Young, but very thorough and well-thought-out.
I recommend it, even though the update schedule is disturbingly reminiscent of my own.
I recommend it, even though the update schedule is disturbingly reminiscent of my own.
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