Archive | August 2016

Conlang all year round – Morphambuary in August Again

We’re back to Morphambuary for another two bound morphemes!

I’ve just started playing with bullet journaling, so today’s going to be a Day Name for Calenyen.

From an earlier post, I have:

From the god/dess Alivetta/Alibetto comes alittao, the art of instrumental music in Bitrani; in Calenyena, this becomes Litvaano, music (as played), and Libbaano, music as sung.

This has led to things related to music and song ending up with the suffix -v/baano.

Foremost among them is the name of the first day of the week:
bikbaano, Song-Day.

bik- by the way, is a shortening of bikdie, day; bik is used in all situations where the day is modified (holiday, song-day, birthday)


For Old Tongue, I’m going to pick another of those add-ons that are often marked by a single diacritical mark. This one, noen, means “now”, but only as attached to a verb: Stand Now, come now, destroy now.

Classically, it is marked by three lines |/ to the top right of the ideogram it is modifying. In texts using letters instead of ideograms, noen is sometimes written out and sometimes marked at the end of the word, as if the word was an ideogram.


Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau 1
Polysemarch
DisMayCourse
Juneme
Julectury
Augovernust
✒️
Febmanteau 2

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1164210.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Landing Page notations

 At  the suggestion of [personal profile] alatefeline  I have started adding a "try starting here" section to the tops of my landing pages, offering easier ingress into settings that can be a little bit overwhelming. 

Landing pages that have been thus updated are:

Stranded World (LJ Link)
Reiassan (LJ Link)
Tir na Cali  (LJ Link)
Faerie Apocalypse (LJ Link)
and
Doomsday

For those settings which are a serial – Addergoole, Edally, Inner Circle, Expectant Wood – the serial itself is generally the best introduction, so I’m skipping those pages. 

Let me know if the format works out for you?

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1163901.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

The Hellmouth Job, Chapters 13 & 14 (A Leverage/Buffy Fanfic)

Part I
Part Ia
Part II
Part III
Chapters 7 & 8
Chapter 9 & 10
Chapters 11 & 12

Thirteen: The Revelations

Hardison was freaking out. “There is no way. I mean — tell me, Eliot, what did this girl look like?”

It wasn’t Eliot that answered, it was Parker. “Hard. Veteran. She’s used to killing and she doesn’t like civilians getting in her way. Like Eliot.”

“What?!” Eliot stopped in his angry stomp across the parking lot to stare at Parker. “She can’t be more than five feet tall and she’s a kid. A teenager. She talks like a mallrat. Her fighting style is all over the place. Like she picked it off the buffet at the local Golden Palace… what?”

“Pretend she didn’t talk like a mallrat,” Parker offered. Her voice was angry enough that Eliot took a step back. “Pretend she didn’t look like a teenager. How old were you when you made your first kill?”

“What? In the army. Eighteen.”

“Some of us didn’t get to be kids, remember?”

“Parker?” Nate’s voice over the comms was quiet. “Tell Eliot what you saw.”

“She’s young, which means she hasn’t figured out where her lines are yet. She has friends — good sign, or a bad one, depending on what they’re doing. But they’re friends, or at least the guy is, not minions or pack members.”

Eliot started to scoff, but something in Parker’s expression held him back. “The boy’s in love with her.”

“He’s in awe of her. But we’re in awe of each other all the time. THe way Nate plans, the way Hardison hacks, the way you hit people… she wasn’t in awe of the way you hit people. What about her style?”

“What style? It had no discipline, no plan; she stopped in the middle to check her shoes…”

“And her killing?” Parker pressed.

“…her killing was efficient,” Elliot admitted. “She hits at least as hard as I do. She moves more quickly — she’s younger,” he added defensively. “Less injuries.”

“When she stopped to check her shoe, she distracted one fo the attackers. It made it easier for her to stick that piece of wood through its chest.”

“Stake,” Tara offered. She sounded subdued. “She staked the vampires.”

“Damnit, vampires,” Eliot complained. “Nate, you didn’t tell me this job had vampires.”

There was a pause. In the hotel room, Nate looked at Sophie, who was looking worried and befuddled. He looked at Hardison, who was busily googling vampires. His gaze settled on Tara.

“Eliot,” he asked slowly, “are you telling me that this isn’t the first time you’ve encountered ‘vampires’?”

“Don’t say it like that.” Eliot pushed his hair out of his eyes. “Come on, Parker, we’re getting out of here. Yeah, Nate.” He stalked down the nearly-empty halls of the mall. “Vampires. They’re some sort of demonic entity. We ran into a nest in Fallujah, another one in Panama.”

“Panama?” Sophie asked. “Really?”

“What, vampires don’t like Central America? Did you know vampires even existed an hour ago?” Eliot was stomping, paying only enough attention to Parker to pull her away from window displays. “No, Parker, we’re not stealing… hockey pads. Why would you even want hockey pads?”

“Oh, that—” Hardison fell quiet at a glare from everyone in the room.

“She’s a thief, Eliot, she likes to steal things.” Sophie’s answer came over soothing. “I wasn’t questioning the vampires’ presence in Panama, I was questioning yours.

“Oh.” He slowed down enough to extricate Parker more gently from the top of what was probably supposed to be a statue and not a jungle gym. “It was a — a thing. Tara, what do you know?”

“I know you don’t wear heels you can’t run in and you always carry two mirrors and a hold-out weapon.”

“Tara!” Eliot snarled the complaint at the mall in general.

“Relax, relax. All right. Have you heard of a Hellmouth?” Tara leaned back in her chair and regarded those members of the team near her.

“Oh, yeah, that’s when a… no.” Hardison fell quiet at Nate’s glare. “No.”

“A Hellmouth.” Eliot frowned. “No. Heard of ‘em, but nobody would ever tell me exactly what they were.”

“Well, you’re on one. And what it is…” Tara paused dramatically. “…well, exactly what it says. It’s a mouth to a hell dimension, possibly to several. It’s a demon magnet, attracting all sorts of evils and some things that aren’t evil, just misunderstood.” She studied her fingernails. “It’s a power source. And the supernatural feeds off it.”

“Great. Just great.” Eliot threw up his hands. “We’re coming back. Nate, the kids knew something. The brunette. But the blonde made me. We’re gonna need someone else to talk to her.”

“Vampires, man,” Hardison complained. “Vampires.

Fourteen: the Assessment.

“Well,” Xander offered awkwardly, “they were certainly friendly. Or something.”

“Chipper,” Buffy complained. “They were chipper.

“Do you think maybe that’s the next, mmm, you know?” Xander offered unhelpfully, hands flailing.

“I’ve never seen a Watcher fight like that,” Buffy answered flatly. “I mean, Giles tries, and he still doesn’t…” She shifted into a combat stance and moved through Dave-Palmer-Elliot’s fighting moves thoughtfully. “He’s good. If they had been humans, they’d have been injured or dead. But he was either putting on a show, or he didn’t know he was fighting vampires.”

“And the girl?”

Buffy’s frown deepened. She thought about the way Kendra had spoken of her Watcher, and the way this girl — Alicia? Parker? — looked at her handler. Devoted. She twisted her lips.

“I don’t know, but I don’t like it.”

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Meta-Conversation Part Four: Uncomfortable Topics

You, the readers, asked Jaco of Lady Taisiya’s Fourth Husband some questions, and he’s already discussed someand then some moreand then he got upset. Here he is, after having taken a brief break to calm his nerves.

When Jaco returns, he bows deeply to the gathered listeners, then sits down. He looks calmer, and quirks an eyebrow at the group as if sharing a joke.

Sauergeek steps forward. “Jaco, you seem to be upset by being on the spot. Is it rude for me to ask what’s bothering you?”

Jaco leans back, much more comfortable now, and clears his throat.

“You can’t fix everything, you know,” he begins, not looking at the cards yet, not quite looking at the audience, either. “Heck,” he jangles his chains, “I can’t fix much at all. And sometimes, sometimes it gets frustrating. Looking at all the things that can’t be fixed, that nobody fixes.” He takes a breath. “My little brother got married before me, and the woman he married, well, let’s just say from the outside it doesn’t look good, and nobody’s getting in to get a better look.”

He flips through the cards slowly. “Ah.” He bows at Clare. “I missed this one. How I was chosen to be one of Lady Taisiya’s husbands. There was a business deal. There’s often a business deal. Lady Taisiya’s House has some very prime land grants, and my mother’s House wanted access to the fishing rights on her coast. My family’s lands are landlocked — I’m told someone made a very bad deal a few generations back in return for a very handsome husband. To be honest,” he ducks his head and smirks, “my family has a habit of making bad decisions for reasons like that.”

This time, he picks a card at random, and smiles. “Ah, an easy one. Raiders. They are — well, when we were brought here, we weren’t the only people brought. There were five different groups. It’s not a small planet, and we are all over the place; I don’t think any of our people know what happened to the two groups on the other side of the world.” He gestures behind him at a big world map consisting mainly of survey photos from space.

“That leaves three groups we know about — ourselves, the ones who hid, and the raiders. I don’t know much about the ones who hid. But the other ones, the raiders, they didn’t want to play by the rules. They don’t play by the rules. They barely play by the treaties.” He gestures with both hands, although the gesture is completely unclear. “They would rather steal what we’ve worked for than work for their own. Most of the time, they just sneak in and steal things. Sometimes they attack instead.”

He keeps moving through the cards. “The Treaties, those are… well, they’re a set of agreements between our people and other people here. They cover things nobody will do, things nobody ought to do, things everybody ought to do, and so on. But they also cover balances of forces and things like that.” He glowers now. “Like I said, the raiders don’t keep to those very well, and it stinks.”

He looks down at a card scribbled with notes regarding Kelkyag and Rix’s conversation while he was out of the room. He looks up again, not quite looking either of those two notables in the eye but coming as close as he has with any woman here.

“When raiders attack, they’ll take everything, if they can. The nursery is the most secure room in any house, and it can usually hold out against attack. That’s why the kids and the junior husbands get sent there.” He smirks faintly. “To protect us. Wives, women, they’ve learned not to let themselves get taken. Even little girls know the drill. But we’re supposed to keep themselves and us alive long enough for help to come, and — let me tell you, not letting your daughter die or be taken, not letting your sons be taken — if it came down to it, I would fight to death, the Treaty be damned.”

He cleared his throat, looking a little embarrassed. “That is, um. They’ll take the eggs if they can, but nobody knows what they do with them. The kids and the husbands — them they enslave.”

It’s my turn to stand up. “We should be wrapping up, so we’ll take one more round of questions before we let Jaco get back to his house and his chores.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1163315.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Regarding Tír na Cali and Technology

This month’s Patreon theme is Tír na Cali, which got me thinking…

One of the things that always gets me about Tír na Cali is the way it started out slightly sci-fi and, more and more, ends up being modern-era in terms of the technology.

When I started working on Cali, smartphones had not yet come into existence. I thought I was making somewhat magical technology:

Collars with a chip that could be read by any police officer with a reader (probably a smartphone ap now) and tracked by anyone with the right information. Collars with technology small enough to carry all of a slave’s “papers” in an easily-transferable format right on the collar. Electronic “keys” the size of a pen (micro-usb?) with a thumbprint reader and the ability to change a collar’s permissions, update or download the data therein, and so on.

And those permissions: collars that “knew” where a slave was allowed to go and, in one case, a “smart home” with doors that would not unlock if the collar approaching it didn’t have the right permissions.

Certainly, Cali still has a wide range of things that can’t be done by modern tech — changing someone into a cat-person hybrid, changing someone’s gender at the genetic level, complete rebuild of a limb, just for a few examples — but that is all covered under their magic, not under their tech.

Basically, in the time I’ve been playing with this setting, their tech has gone from being cutting-edge stuff that didn’t exist in the mainstream to being — if I hadn’t updated it as I went along — a little backwards. I mean, really, shouldn’t that collar be able to serve as a Bluetooth headset? What do you mean, you can’t text from your slave collar? No streaming videos?

…okay, now I’m wandering off on a whole new brainstorm. *wanders off, muttering about wi-fi hotspots*


*pops back in* New to Tír na Cali? I updated the landing page with a few suggestions for starting places.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1162884.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Finding the Target

a story of Doomsday/Cloverleaf

Directly after Passing the Torch.

Sunny left Red Doomsday talking to Luke – Luke! He was a legend! – and wandered over to the group of kids – students, barely younger than she was – loitering by the picket fence.

Not Howard-, Leo- or Cabal-type, Cya had said, and Luke’s eyes had drifted over to the tall blonde with the cow horns and something had looked like relief in his posture. So not the cow-blonde that looked a bit like Howard. She looked through the rest of them.

Cya had talked her through this part. “You do what you can with your Find power, and then you try to do more than you can. So…. start with Finding the guy you can live with or the guys you can help and live with. And keep adding on qualifiers until you’re looking for a left-handed elf ranger who’s good with his tongue and knows when to shut up.”

But what if I ask the wrong thing? Sunny had asked, and Cya had smiled, a little tiredly, perhaps, and answered Then you’ll be in good company. And a year later, you’ll know what not to ask.

Lady Red Doomsday had been doing this for a long time, Sunny knew, since before that mystical End the old fae talked about. Maybe she’d forgotten how nerve-wracking it would be the first time.

“Hey,” she greeted the loiterers, while she let her power do a little walking. She had been learning finesse in the last couple years, but it was still better for, as Aron liked to say, finding Cloverleaf, not finding a particular clover-leaf..

They gave her a range of nervous and uncertain expressions, some distrustful, some almost hopeful. One of them — a redhead, tall and lanky and uncertain – was looking over at Red Doomsday.

Her power was saying him or maybe the short dark-skinned girl standing in his shadow. She decided to try her gut.

“She doesn’t do that anymore,” she said, gently, answering the unspoken question and hoping she had the right question. “I mean, it’s her, yeah, but she retired.”

“Yeah?” He eyed her, taking her in and clearly not sure what to make of what he saw. Sunny didn’t look much older than them — she wasn’t much older than them — but, then again, neither did Red Doomsday, and she was old enough to own a nation. “That’s her, though? Red Doomsday? The Lady Who Takes ‘Em?”

“Not the fanciest of her titles,” Sunny laughed, “but that’s her. Mayor of Cloverleaf.”

THe title meant nothing to him, Sunny could tell. “But she doesn’t do the taking anymore? That what you came over to tell us?”

“Well, I think of that more as a prelude,” Sunny offered. She might have her Mentor’s innate power, but she had nothing like Cya’s skill in Tempero Intinn, Control Mind. She was going to have to talk her prey into coming with her. “Because she doesn’t anymore… but I do.”

“You?” He looked at her again. “You’re gonna feed me and keep a roof over me and find me a place, after? You’re gonna Keep me?”

“You volunteering?” She shifted forward, putting herself in his personal space. He reminded her a little of Kerr, but just enough to be interesting.

He was still over a head taller than her. He looked down at her thoughtfully. “You can get me out of here?”

“Oh, that part’s easy.” She gestured at Kurt, Cya’s teleporter this year. “The question comes afterward. You want to go to Cloverleaf, or you want to be mine?”

I want to go to Cloverleaf,” the cow-horned one put in. “Don’t particularly want another collar, though.”

“I can get you to Cloverleaf. I can probably get you all to Cloverleaf.” She looked up at her target. “So?”

He looked away for a minute, but Sunny could already tell she’d hooked him. He nodded slowly. “Yeah. I want assurances, but give me those and I’ll be yours for a year.”

Sunny nodded solemnly. It hid her grin of triumph. “I brought some paper so we can write something up.”

Support the Thorne-Author

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Conlang all year round – Augovernust in August

Hey, we’re up to August!!

I’m going through 365 Conlang thingies beyond #Lexember (which is missing October…) one month a day up to August. Not sure which way I’ll go in September.

August is Augovernust – Write down a clause of your user agreement, license, patent, copyright notice, lawsuit, Community Commons notice, membership rules, mailing list behavior guidelines each day of the month.

So below, and being transferred to my webpage soon, is my…

Fanfiction Policy

You are welcome to write fanfiction or create fanart of any of my universes, as long as you do the following:

  • Do not ask or accept money for any works created in my worlds(*).
  • Post a link back to my web page, the landing page for the setting, or (in the case of the serials) the webpage of the serial (Edally, Addergoole).
  • If on AO3: tag the setting. Addergoole already has its own tag, huzzah.

In addition, I would appreciate but do not require:

  • Send me a link to your fanwork.

I am available to discuss setting details in any setting as time allows.

Fanfiction is not considered canon in my worlds except in immensely rare situations by arrangement between myself and the creator of said fic.

(*) The exception to this would be situations in which I directly commission a piece and pay for it.


Morphambruary 1
Febmanteau
Polysemarch
DisMayCourse
Juneme
Julectury
✒️
Morphambruary 2
✒️
Augovernust 2

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1162334.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Weekend, Pinterest, Instant Pot, etc.

  • If you use Pinterest, have you ever found yourself in Pinboard Bloat? Like, you start a board, Pinterest suggests some similar boards, so you follow them, then Pinterest is like “try these suggested pins” so you pin those and the next thing you know, your little board of, say, Addergoole Changes is a giant behemoth of mermaids and satyr beefcake and winggy people?

    Or, ah, is that just me?

  • Have I mentioned I love our InstantPot? So far, we’ve only made two dishes in it, but love it!
  • If you haven’t checked in on the new Addergoole page, you can still earn fic with comments!
  • And if you know anyone who might be interested in supporting my Patreon, Nimbus is stuck in the man-eating plant, and only the patrons can get her out!

    (a couple patrons had to reduce or drop patronizing due to funding issues, and thus we are back down below the $40 net “serial episode a month” level. Poor Nimbus! Stuck! ~Woe~!)

  • And this weekend: We installed a toilet!
    Seriously, even if they tell you when you buy a toilet that there’s a wax ring in the package, buy two. Not one, two. You won’t regret it.

    That being said, our pretty new reasonable-height dual-flush toilet is in and goes, YAY!

    Our old one had been first stained by our rusty water.

    And then some previous tenant had used something so corrosive to clean the orange that it had stripped the enamel off the porcelain.

    And then the house was winterized, and the blue dye… stained the porcelain.

    Black veined toilet! Ick!

    (we’re looking into water softeners now…)

    That’s one more step towards a non-ugly bathroom!

  • I’m low on interesting links this week, so how about you? Share your cool links!

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1161402.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable

Conlang all year round – Julectury in August

I continue on my I-missed-Conlanging adventure. Today is Julectury: Write a lecture, lesson or 140 letter pedagogical tweet each day explaining how your language works.

What I’m trying to create here would be two laypeople’s introductions to the languages, because man would it be cool if I could get enough vocabulary that someone could speak either of these languages. I’ll start with one small section of each language:


Gender:
Calenyen marks three genders:
useful (bon)
useless (byon)
and beyond-use (obon)

These are marked by the initial letter of the word:
a non-palatalized consonant for useful
a palatalized consonant for useless
a vowel for beyond-use

And they are described thus:
Useful nouns fulfil a needed function or are desirable: an engineer, a wrench, a weasel
Most people’s names begin this way.
Useless nouns are unneeded or actively get in the way, or are just less desirable: a bad unskilled worker, a broken pipe, a vermin-creature
There are some people who name more-children-than-needed this way.
Beyond Use are parts of the world that are too large to be measured in such terms: the earth, the ocean, the mountains, the river, the sun, the stars.
People who can trace their ancestry to an emperor are named with a vowel, okol*, at the beginning.

*Okol is the royal vowel; a vowel in general is kol

A new word can be coined by changing the original vowel. So, a useful rat, a useless Engineer, and so on. Changing a person’s name thus is considered extremely insulting.


(I’m much less far along on Old Tongue, as I’m sure you’ve noticed…)

Use

Old Tongue could be considered a dead language, in that, up until the second generation of Addergoole, it has had no native speakers on Earth; however, it has been in use as a scholarly/academic language for Ellehemaei for centuries, and is often used as a code language between non-academically minded Ellehemaei.

Alphabet

Its writing system is an alphabet with modifying diacritical marks.

It began as a ideogramic system, the diacritical marks serving as changes to the meaning of the symbol (showing time, movement, and so on); many scholars continue to use the ideogrammic meaning of the letters to convey a secondary meaning. For instance, a clever scribe might began a page on half-breeds with an illuminated letter whose ideogrammic meaning is “bastard child”.


Morphambruary
Febmanteau
Polysemarch
DisMayCourse
Juneme
✒️
Augovernust
✒️
Julectury 2

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1161128.html. You can comment here or there. comment count unavailable