Gestures & Sayings

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Again tonight the original thought processes are eluding me – so I spent some time doing realm work.  Many years ago I stumbled across this site and it had a long-lasting impact on the things I want to include in the creation of a realm (or realms as the case may be now).  Having served in the military overseas I tried to take note of sayings and gestures in different cultures.  I’ve spent a little bit of time here and there coming up with different sayings and gestures for my realm.

In doing research (once again at the oracle of knowledge known as Wikipedia) I have discovered that there are some really interesting customs in the world today. I think it is particularly intriguing that signs like “ok” with your hand are rude and offensive in other cultures.  I hadn’t thought of making a dual meaning gestures before – but now I am thinking it might be fun.

Somewhere in my meanderings I came across a few articles about revenge. To people who say “revenge is a dish best served cold” I retort – “have you ever tried it microwaved”.  I understand the underlying sentiment that revenge which is enacted with a period of expectation or dread is more fulfilling to some. For me it’s better to execute the revenge swiftly, silently and with due prejudice.  Unlike most people the mere act of vengeance is enough for me, I don’t need the other party to know it was me who achieved parity.

Another interesting cultural trait I intend on having literary fun with is honor. Honor is already a word that has a lot of different meanings and carries a varying degree of importance depending on the culture.

Deep down I know the real reason I like going to such depth in realm creation is because it allows me to spend time on the writing process – without having to actually write anything =P

 

Writing is writing

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Another day without entertainment writing.  I’m trying not to classify it as “creative writing” because almost anything I write is creative =P

Emails, volunteer documentation, etc. – all worth the time spent – but not writing for publication.

Long Day

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At 0412 this morning my son woke me up because the storm had scared him. After I got him back to sleep I was too awake to go back to bed (had to get up at 5 anyways).

Between 0510 and 1827 I was either traveling to or from work or working at the office.  I didn’t even go to lunch today.  About 20 mins after I got home from work I remotely logged in and started working again.

It’s 2238 and I have stopped working long enough to post this – needless to say there was no writing (well creative writing – heck even that is in doubt – some of my work emails are really creative!) today.

Back to work..

First Prompt Post

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The prompt was:

college student, crumpled paper, laptop, train

At 723 words but my daughter wants me to go read her to sleep (which means I’ll probably fall asleep myself not long after her). When it is done and somewhat coherent I’ll update this post.

History

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I’ve been a fan of history for as long as I can remember.  I spent a number of my elementary years devouring history texts and biographies of everyone from Helen Keller to King Alfred. I can get immersed in watching the History channels and let half the day slip by.  So tonight while I was trying to get the cranial juices flowing I decided to Google “what happened today in history.” Sub-consciously I know that I have probably been here before but I don’t remember it. I’m thinking this might be a good place to get some writing prompts.

As usual however Google came through with a few sites that I am pretty sure I have never seen. A couple of them looked more like a way to sell something than a place to inspire topics for writing. A few others started throwing up popup adds and other such nonsense so they got ye old Alt-F4. This one however had a few items that led me off into Wikitopia (where you wander into a link at Wikipedia and realize an hour later you’re fourteen pages away from whatever it was that brought you there in the first place.)  Brainyhistory was another site where I lost more time than I had anticipated. It actually had a date for the year 250. On this day in 250, Saint Fabian was executed for his refusal to deny Christ.

One interesting observation struck me as I was perusing these sites, they were all mostly set to Eastern Standard Time (EST). I kept going to sites that were already providing me the “Day in History” for tomorrow. When are they going to realize there are only two time zones to select from when automating date entries in web pages?  Those two are either UTC (the time-zone formerly known as GMT) or PST.  Why PST? Because everyone knows that Silicon Valley is the centre of all things IT and besides – it’s the timezone Blizzard uses.

 

Click Here to Accept

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I was explaining to a co-worker today about a smart phone app called Voxer. It turns your phone into a walkie-talkie, kind of.  Actually what it appears to do is record your voice, attach it as a sound file to an IM and send it to the person you want to talk to.  Sounds pretty cool right?

I went to download the app and as usual I got the list of all the things it wants to do to my phone.  Unlike most of the apps I have downloaded (I’m a pretty low-brow user, my phone is…a phone – if I want apps I’ll use one of my many PCs) the list of things it wants to do to my phone was so long I had to click ‘See More’ (or something along those lines). I was stupefied at the permissions the application wanted.  I ventured over to Google to see if I could find a review somewhere by someone with security as the focus of their review – nothing. The app is fairly new so I am guessing that is the reason. One of the principals in the organization appears to be a former special forces member – which doesn’t actually mean diddly to me – but seems to be important to them. In reviewing the privacy policy I came across the following section:

Your Alternative Emails, Phone Numbers, and Contact Information.  We employ various techniques in order to facilitate friends finding each other on our service.  We will collect information including your emails and phone numbers from your address book, or from the address books of other Voxer users who have you as a contact if they agree to have us search for their friends in their address book.  We do this only for contact matching to help your friends and you find each other. We also collect some settings that help us to interpret your data, such as the language and keyboard settings that you have established, and the phone’s carrier, mobile network code and mobile country code.

 

Site Activity Information; Device and Browser Information. We may keep track of some of the activities you participate in while using the Voxer Site. In some cases you are also taking an action when you provide information or content to us. When you access the Voxer Site from a computer, mobile phone, or other device, we may collect information from that device about your browser type, location, and IP address, as well as the pages you visit, etc.

WTF? If parsing my address book to hunt down and harass my contacts isn’t bad enough they’re gonna snarf my internet cache! Special forces eh? Probably moved to the CIA! =P This got me to wondering what the privacy policy of other web based services really contain.  Google’s seems fairly straight forward but Facebook’s is overly complicated – and I’m just talking about trying to read the damn thing!

The things that Voxer wants to do are currently a tad more than I am willing to accept, so I haven’t signed up for the service, yet. I’ve spent the last 20+ years involved in communications security – the last 15+ specifically dealing with IP based networks, so I don’t know what I am worried about. Deep down I know the reality is that all our information that we want private, secure and under our control is out there running wild and free with the neighbor’s teeange son. You know the one with the tinted windowed, 4×4 van complete with curtains and an air mattress – your privacy is….

Interestingly enough one of the functions it wanted that I am really uncomfortable with is the ability to disable my phone’s sleep function. I have a hard enough time remembering to charge the damn thing as it is.

World Building Considerations

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In reading a book on writing science fiction I learned that the reader who reads that genre has an expectation that the writer is going to either follow the laws of physics as we currently understand them or have a damn good explanation why not. If the author comes up with some new form of faster-than-light travel there had better be a really good explanation of why and how it works.  My first reaction was “whatever” because I never consciously analyze the scientific probability of something I am reading for entertainment.  The more I thought about it though, the more I realized I do – just not with science fiction, at least not consciously.

There is  something that authors of fantasy do all the time that annoys the shit out of me.  They draw these really cool maps with mountains, rivers, deserts and forests placed in precisely the right locations for the story to work.  They don’t however seem to give much effort to establishing a foundation for the geographic reality of their creation.  I don’t why it annoys me – it’s not like I’m a geography major or geologist, but it does.

To that end I have tried to  educate myself with what natural phenomenon would account for the creation of a desert or the elevation required for a Montane forest.  Now I’m not a total stick-in-the-mud – I’ve reserved the right to blast a mountain out of existence right where I need a pass to facilitate the flight from the evil Cheesemaster of Fungadoria, but for the most part I want to stick with something that makes sense.

It’s more than just the lay of the land one needs to understand when developing a world though.  There are things like the proximity to the sun, rotation of the planet, existence of radiation belts, etc.  All things that don’t really belong in a fantasy novel.  I do think though that the information can be inferred in an entertaining manner if it is given a bit of thought. If the sky has two moons there would probably be a pretty significant impact on the tides (presuming the world had large bodies of water). So if all the seas are peaceful and calm it’s going to conflict with my belief of how it should be and thus distract from my enjoyment of the material.

Weather is another thing that impacts the geography.  Powerful winds and torrential rains will cause great amounts of erosion for example. There should be signs of this in descriptions of environment. The weather itself will be impacted by the geography – the chinook winds coming off the eastern slope of the Rockies wouldn’t exist without the proximity of the Pacific (and I would presume a few other factors, I’m not a geologist or a weatherman, I just stayed in a Holiday Inn Express last night).

Part of me thinks this effort is just another way to not write – to find something else I need to research so I don’t have to pound out pages of dialog, setting and voice.  Maybe – but it really does annoy me, so I don’t think so.  Someday when I’ve actually finished something I think I’ll send it off to the local college geology department for review and maybe the local weatherman.