OK, this is kind of lame and weird at the same time. Following on the creation of the Avarthrel characters as Miis, here's Faira as she appears in Animal Crossing: Let's Go to the City. I have to say that the game doesn't quite have the appeal of other games in the series, but it's still a rather nice game to waste time on. Not bad waste of time, actually. Kind of funny, at some times. And, of course, the game has a shady fox in it.

Okay, why the heck is Faira in a kid-friendly game? I have no idea. Perhaps she just enjoys seeing cute animals. Or perhaps she's just trying to learn to fish. I mean, that's what her parents did.

I usually play as my primary character in the game, but I wanted to create a second character just for the heck of it. And here's one!

I've started to collect not-so-modern stuff in Faira's home. Harder than it seems. However, I have some extremely essential stuff already, such as this wonderful item that this fox sold me cheaply for...

...no wonder the thing was so cheap. I wonder if I can find a fence in this game that would gracefully sell gold bars worth a few million Bells?

I was kind of inspired to do a small update to the website today after reading Slashdot story about Scridb folks opening an e-book sales channel. (Won't affect me - first, my stories are under Creative Commons licenses and shall remain so; second, if I want my stuff published through commercial channels I expect some sort of editorial gatekeeping to go with it; third, the bloody thing is only available on US at the moment anyway).

The Avarthrel tales have been on Scribd for a while now. I've had a couple of reads, it seems, though not too many since the initial publication. Not exactly a rousing success, and not really all that much bigger than my success in deviantART or Elfwood so far. Not that I'd be complaining - any reads are good reads =) I guess I just need to write more.

Though, I have to say the whole premise of Scribd is a little bit weird. I uploaded mostly textual PDFs, which get read through this weird Flash-based PDF reader. This, on the Web. You know, the famed text-based medium. We'll see how this thing pans out. I'm actually more looking forward to publishing comics this way, one day; deviantART doesn't handle multi-page things too well, for example.

Anyway, I now put a random link to my scribd page to the Avarthrel web site sidebar.

...I guess I had to just say something to fill the void. It's not like there's been a lot of things happening in Avarthrel development lately, but at least there has been some slow progress. I'll probably post more about my (non-)experiences with Celtx soon.

Today's big Avarthrel project was about getting grips of OpenLayers. I was surprised by the fact that taking my map and turning it into an easy-to-use scrollable thing was actually rather painless... as long as you remember to mention to the program that "hey, this map represents a... hum... flat-projected area from (0,0) to about (1629900,1225800) meters, give or take. I'm not a top-notch geographer, dammit." Actually getting the map to the web site would take some tiny effort on the template side - so I'll roll it out once the map is, shall we say, more interesting. Currently, you can just look at the map and adore the pixelated pixels by zooming in...

And thank goddess that I could actually just tell OpenLayers "the map is flat and it's about this big, deal with it." The annoying part of most software I've thought of using for assistance in world-building is that they tend to assume a lot - mostly a) that the user is an expert of the field or b) that you're using this program in Earth using modern forms of measurements.

I'm not super-good with geography - just recalling stuff from the school - so if the software would have wanted, say, exact coordinates where this map is from, I would have needed to seriously brush up my mathematics. (Let's see... I've usually figured Anchorfall would have been around the same latitude as, uh, say, Helsinki, so that's about 60 degrees north, right? OK, given that, how the heck do I convert this particular rectangle to degree coordinates? *scribble scribble scribble headache*)
Earth and Earth-like measurements can be a problem, too. In case of Avarthrel, I just skirted a lot of problems by noting that, by amazing coincidence, the planet is just about the same size as Earth and the year has the same number of days... and even more amazingly, the currently predominantly used calendar corresponds to Gregorian calendar, so my perpetual calendar applications actually work. But the same can't be said about the previously used calendars: Using the Imperial and Elven calendars needs some handwork to figure out the corresponding year. Now, how do I specify dates in those weird calendars in some of the programs I have at hand?
No, really?
For example, I'm using Storybook to manage the novel I'm writing. It can tell me that, oh yes, there's a revolution in my story, and it occurred one beautiful Saturday. (Or, er, Trinsday.) Easy enough. But the makers of Storybook make one big assumption here: Not everyone keeps time the same way. I can hardly blame them: it's not their fault that the author could decide that this particular world used different sort of a timekeeping system. The alternatives would be to allow free-form date entry (thus losing all neat functionality associated with dates), or allow the user to specify the timekeeping system from ground up.
So in short, it's pretty annoying to write fantasy (or SF, I guess): when the world doesn't work like Earth, the software isn't keeping up...