Avarthrel Blog

Some of Kara's influences

2010-05-26T11:42:42Z

...or, "jokes aren't funny once you explain them". But some jokes are not funny after you realise the fact that the reality can be a depressing place.

I've talked a lot about the influences behind Kara the Assassin to my friends, but it seems that I haven't talked about these influences a lot to other people. Funny, that.

Inspirations to the comics come from a lot of sources. I always try to make the fiction to look far too different from the reality to make the comic interesting enough on its own accord.

]]> various references to various video games. Sometimes, I've kept those references simple and not-so-obvious. (Example of a thing you probably can't notice in a small-resolution web version: Kara's lute was made by "Gondola"; a reference to Finnish guitar maker Landola, and also serves as a reference to Assassin's Creed II.)

Some of the comics have been influenced by a fellow by the name of Christian Weston Chandler, a highly eccentric net personality. "Viggar Lucifeir" is a name mutation on "CWC" (which he pronounces like "quick") and, um, chandeliers, perhaps. The character was described as a "socialite and a prominent engineer's son". He made weird advances toward the young ladies and tried to get them into his fully equipped adobe.

In real life, Chris was trolled by a completely fictitious persona called "Ivy" who had a bunch of flower-themed friends. This was in my mind as I made the map of the Anchorfall Botanical Gardens area, complete with Ivy Lane, Freshbreeze Boulevard and Scentful Crossing (people have commented that the guy probably kind of smells), Wallrose street (referring to yet another person who prefers to stay unknown), Foreman road (the guy clashed with authority figures), Blowhard street (Lots of weird videos on YouTube!), and Usurper's Tum (in Avarthrel, this is obviously reference to a rather unpopular almost tyrannical king - it's not at all a reference to a certain imposter in brown-striped shirt... what makes you think that?).

There's a small lesson to be learned here: This could look like a perfectly normal set of street names for a neighbourhood around botanical gardens... or, it could look like a horrible set of in-jokes. If you make a horrible set of in-jokes, at least make sure it looks like something else too. Something plausible, perhaps.

The comic also features stick-figure porn (if you can call it that). CWC introduced explicit pornography into his comic without second thoughts, but I've tried to be careful. I've tried to keep the comic as late-teens safe. The non-stick-figure porn didn't actually happen, and explicit sex probably isn't coming to the comic ever - mostly because the primary hosts (SmackJeeves and deviantART) don't like explicit sex.

Finally, the guy made a comic that featured stuff a normal author might have left in the drawer: a whole scene of people counting change by a vending machine. This sort of scenes should generally be put in the comic only if there's some sort of point to all of that. If there is a problem with the local currencies, it has to be addressed.

So much for funny inspiration sources; Then, there's also the not-so-funny sources. Curb the Hatred was inspired by Fundies Say the Darndest Things, specifically, a random quote that could have been propaganda but was pretty sad anyway. People on FSTDT generally recommend this kind of people to find a fire and die in one. Getting their heads nailed on the wall with a giant nail is probably good too. (And before you ask: Yes, I had seen "Piranha Brothers". No, I didn't remember it that day. Subconscious something-or-other.)

The real reason why I'm making this blog is that yesterday, I made a comic about children who have too damn strict parents. The comic was based on a FSTDT quote, and I kept thinking of what if some very downtrodden children would get access to weapons. When I wrote this script I had this nagging feeling that I couldn't really nail this guy's dialogue - it just seemed a bit tame. After the comic was done, I, out of sheer luck, found the original quote that inspired the comic. Between November and May, I had forgotten what the sheer horror that quote implied. No wonder my dialogue sounded lame!

Testing a "writer's word processor"

2010-05-10T15:31:31Z

I've been looking for a word processor that might work better than OpenOffice.org Writer for the purpose of writing fiction. I have a rather haphazard list of features that I deem necessary, and I really should write them down some day.

That said, so far it seems that TextRoom is the best software I've found. It's still far from perfect, but it looks like a good try.

]]> WriteRoom, which is one of these newfangled "distractionless" word processors. (I've also previously evaluated PyRoom, which is also nice, but needs some gimmicks to run on Windows, while TextRoom has pre-built binaires for Windows and Linux.)

"Distractionless" word processors sound like a good concept, unless you're a bit of a cynic. Here's what I wrote about "distractionless" word processors earlier, because I've actually implemented one myself - sort of. I'm working on marketing material for Conman's Dictionary, which includes a brief bit on this awesome application.

The trend in modern writing applications - that is to say, software geared toward novelists - is toward simplicity and lack of user interface clutter.
Conman's Dictionary is in the front trenches of this battle with its revolutionary Notepad feature, which will allow you to make relevant and accurate notes with the rampant one-track-minded ferocity of the dreaded Swampspector himself. The notepad itself consists of an elegantly initialised JEditorPane instance, which also utilises a scrollbar in form of a likewise simply and elegantly initialised JScrollPane instance. Dismissal of the editor is handled through the very latest in button technology, a JButton - pure, simple, standardised, unambiguously labelled as the close button; perhaps a tad bit conservative in its design, but nevertheless exhibiting functionality over form. Text of the editor is practically stored in the most fitting of XML datatypes, an xs:string, one of the most elementary and efficient of XML datatypes in use. When using the Notepad feature in Conman's Dictionary, you can almost see that you are editing a long litany of characters stored in the file between and tags as a simple character stream. No formatting, save whitespace; just you, your text, a text editor control and a button to end your ardourous day of work.
..."So this Notepad is just a bloody normal Java plain text editor field", I hear you say after a pregnant pause. I smile and nod... and you smile and nod in return; we both know how these modern word processors are fundamentally awful and blatantly over-engineered for wrong purposes - they're all geared toward office peons writing forgettable rubbish paperwork, not true artists working on true literary art.
Seriously, though, the Notepad is highly useful for storing simple notes for work-in-progress stuff, and it's stored right in the same file with the dictionary itself.

This pretty much summarises why I've never really bothered with these software packages. WriteRoom is a bog-ordinary, rather limited text editor which sells for $25. TextRoom is basically a Qt HTML editor widget in a nice wrapping. I get this weird moral dissonance that says that "less feature-packed software does the job, dammit", but also "the more you think of it, the more it sounds like snake oil".

So, here is why I think TextRoom is awesome:

Runs on both Linux and Windows.
It actually has on-screen formatting. If I want italics, it will show up as italics.
The file format is basically just souped-up HTML - easy to import, probably.
The Word Processor shall have white text on blue background, all else is heresy, and TextRoom lets me use this colour scheme. The colours that are displayed on the screen are not the colours that get in the actual document. They're just the colours that are good for your eyes when you write the bloody text

The last is the biggest selling point for me. When I write the text, I don't care what the text looks like. I care that my eyes don't bleed while I write.

But still, when I write, I care about semantics: I want to make sure headings are there, I want to make sure quotation marks and dashes are there, and I want emphasis when emphasis is due. So here are some of its shortcomings:

When you introduce features like "full control over fonts", it gets grimy. If I specify an on-screen font, I expect that to be used for the whole text. I only need italics or bold for specific parts. Now, it lets me micro-manage the formatting, which isn't an entirely good thing.
I like automatic smart quotation marks in OpenOffice.org; I get "quotes like this" for English and "quotes like this" for Finnish without any extra effort. Similarly "space dash space" brings me an en dash. Really, all I need is a convenient way to drop in the special bits of typography that the keyboard doesn't have.
OpenDocument support would be awesome. If I could swap stuff between TextRoom and OpenOffice.org without any data loss at any point, life would be sweet. It would be awesome to use one program for producing text, and another for formatting it, working on macros and all that other crap. It'd perhaps work even better if it also supported paragraph styles: I don't want to touch formatting, but if I want a header in the text, I usually want it to actually, you know, be a header.

But still, having written a bit with TextRoom for now, it seems fairly awesome. I'll probably post more about this when I get inspired enough.

Do software licences get you down?

2010-05-02T10:58:10Z

I haven’t blogged anything for a while, so here’s something just to get me back on track… A little bit on video weirdness and fan fiction weirdness.

]]> Recently, there’s been some rumbling about free standards on the Web. Commercial software providers are pushing for H.264 as the HTML 5 video standard. The problem is that H.264 (also known as MPEG-4 Advanced Video Codec, the codec that’s used in Blu-Ray discs and HD video cameras too) is heavily patented, while Web standards have traditionally been free to use; simply put, you don’t have to pay anything to anyone to implement a Web browser. There is a free-to-use video standard called Theora that isn’t quite as advanced as H.264; people are also pushing Google to open up a video codec called VP8, which would be a contender to H.264.

There’s a big problem that the H.264 proponents frequently ignore: As the Free Software Foundation points out, H.264 licences only allow the H.264 licenced software to be used for the “personal and non-commercial use”. If you want to use it for commercial purposes, you supposedly need to pay more. No, this is not included in the price of most H.264 applications; even Final Cut Pro, Apple’s flagship video editor software, is only licenced for “personal and non-commercial” H.264 use. People probably frequently ignore this little condition. People could get bitten in the butt pretty severely in the future. (A decade ago, people said “who cares - MP3 is free!”… and the next month, hardware manufacturers were paying MP3 licence fees.)

But I’m not writing this to whine about H.264 specifically. I’m writing this to whine about the “personal and non-commercial use”.

I’ve seen an incredible amount of drama in fan fiction circles, even when I don’t even read fan fiction. I get it; people like TV series and video games and whatnot a lot, and then enter into pointless squabbles over whose fan character is the best. Then they enter into even more pointless squabbles over who has the right to use which fan character.

They all forget one big thing: they’re guests in the house. They don’t have the rights to their fan characters. The real owners of the franchises own the rights.

This is the big trap that people wander into when they venture in the land of “personal and non-commercial use”. There’s always a big threat hanging above their heads: someone else has the right to say that this won’t do.

I’ve seen people build entire imaginary media empires around Sonic the Hedgehog and Pokémon. These imaginary media empires exist because Sega and Nintendo allow them to exist; if they didn’t, they’d be crushed.

It is my opinion that fan fiction is a similar sort of trap as the H.264 licence situation. People find something awesome. They pretend to themselves that there’s a niche here that they’re allowed to use for their own good. What’s really happening is that they’re not really aware of who is in the full rights to stomp them.

Personally, I’ve always felt uneasy when I’ve used software that is only intended for “personal and non-commercial use”. On the other hand, free and open source software has always felt like the right choice for me, because it won’t try to dictate how the hell am I supposed to actually use the software. Software that says it’s only for “personal and non-commercial use” is saying “You’re not a professional. You’re not creative. What you create with this software is insignificant. What you create with this software will always remain unprofitable, because we say so. You are a normal consumer, and normal consumers don’t create. Normal consumers are not allowed to be creative in any way.”

Note that I’m not saying that true art is always commercially profitable, or even the inverse case that the true art should always be non-profit. What I’m saying is that true art shouldn’t be constrained by that sort of thing. Artists create something, and they shouldn’t need to be concerned whether or not the artwork is, one day, going to make money. That sort of thing puts limits to one’s creativity. What would you say if you created artwork for non-profit purposes, and when this work would be sold after the eventual thunderous posthumous recognition, the first thing the buyer would see would be the software vendor asking for money?

It’s same sort of thing with fan fiction. “You’re a guest. You’re allowed to create fan fiction because it’s nice. But you’re destined to always be derivative. You’re not the Creator. You’re the Fan. The Fans are not really creative, they’re just repeating what the Creator did.”

And what I’m trying to say is this: Normal consumers are allowed to be creative. You are allowed to be creative. Creativity is everyone’s right. Software licences that tell you that you’re not allowed to use a piece of software to express your creativity and reap all of the potential benefits from it.

Similarly, I don’t want people to create Avarthrel “fan fiction”. I want people to create their own works based on Avarthrel. I don’t want people to just be “fans” who create works in my shadow; I want people to contribute in their own way. If you are creating an epic fantasy work and suddenly realise “damn it, I don’t want to create an Avarthrel-based work after all, I’m a great author on my own merits and want to create something original instead”, that’s your right and I’m willing to accept that too - I’m not that attached to my very own media franchise cashcow thing.

The latter is, of course, just academic because I don’t have actual fans who would be doing this. All I’m saying is that if you create fan works, then bloody heck, there’s nothing stopping you from creating something actually original. It could be a liberating experience. Try it!

Surprisingly few non-news news

2010-03-12T22:25:15Z

I decided to write a small situation report, because there are actually situations that need reporting about. Without further ado, some inconvenient bullet points:

My laptop was out of commission for a while (I just started it up last week and - whoops! - turned out it works perfectly after all). I wasn't writing stuff. I am now.
I'm... pretty much doing the same stuff as before, what comes to the stories. These things sometimes take a long time to materialise, dammit...
Kara the Assassin is doing fine! I'm now in middle of the first "serious interlude" in the comic. I'm trying to organise the comic in yearly volumes so that every yearly volume has one such longer serious interlude of maybe 4-5 pages. This particular interlude is, um, the Epic Character Background Thingie Comic.
I'm also sort of in process of tweaking the PDFs. I figured out a way to include full-page cover art in XeLaTeX (tip: look up "pdfpages"), so I can do the covers in Inkscape and do the rest of the typesetting in LaTeX. Now I just need the bloody cover art.

The biggest news:

I'm currently in some sort of really weird rage mode. I need to work on Conman's Dictionary. If you want to see the code, it was just migrated to Gitorious.org today. I need to put out a working 1.0 release soon. Why? Because I was inspired to write sarcastic and pretty stupid advertisement for the web site for the occasion - it'll be there when the biggest features I want will be in the software and I iron out the wrinkles and actually release the version 1.0. Sometimes, the strangest things motivate me to do things.

Grave Movable Type news

2009-11-16T12:08:32Z

"Movable Type 5 no longer supports SQLite or PostgreSQL."

Bbbbbbbbbbbbbastards. And I was so sure I wouldn't need to migrate to other systems any more.

So, Movable Type 5 only supports MySQL, a database engine I'm not sure even exists any more, after recent massive forking and corporate acquisitions and shuffling of key developers and whatnot. Most importantly, since these blogs I have here are based on SQLite, I've left with no way to upgrade this stuff.

So I'm possibly hereby annoucing a very preliminary plan for a great, dramatic transition to Drupal 7 when it comes out. They support SQLite and PostgreSQL.

Dear ladies...

2009-11-11T17:55:57Z

(...or, as far as subtitles go, "a lonesome geek posts stuff that doesn't exactly demolish all of those stereotypes" or perhaps "I just had to post it, okay?")

Yesterday, I posted here a plea for feedback, addressed in general to my well-hidden and sporadic crowd of readers.

Today, come what may, I'm asking a question that has been bugging me for a while. I'm asking for opinions about my stories from female readers. I want to write fiction that's accessible and comprehensible for all kinds of people, say, young adults upwards. (As the sufficiently self-critical author of the stories, I just can't imagine anyone's enjoying these stories really all that much, so I'm shy of advertising them as "enjoyable" in addition to those traits. But I do hope they're enjoyable too.) It's hard to get a comprehensive picture when most of my friends, the regular commenters, are all male. The only female reader who has commented on multiple stories of mine is my sister, and a) she hasn't commented on my recent works at all, so I have no idea how I'm faring now, and b) a group of one is hardly a statistically representative sample. She, along with the few other gentle passing-by ladies who decided to comment on the stories, appeared to like them though. I'm just curious about the rest of them.

In yesterday's post, I failed to list which of my stories I want feedback to right now. Only to the latest of the stories, because they haven't really been read and commented by so many people. And by latest, I mean the one with the rainy day, the strange religious contemplation, a bit of war and the eternal mysteries of the society - perhaps even that one bit with the odd animals, but I know it was not technically a superb story. Also, I'm curious about the webcomic. I don't really know what else to say in this request, save of what I already outlined in yesterday's request. I'm just curious about what works here, and what doesn't; good sides, bad sides, what went right, what went wrong, what's to love, what's to hate.

So, that's my request, and when I read through it again, it didn't quite read like as weird as I thought it would look like, so I guess I'll just go ahead and post it now. (I feel so much better when I've got these odd questions out! Maybe I'll post better blog posts tomorrow!)

Whining on feedback

2009-11-10T20:55:04Z

...which should be easy if no one's reading this. Well, I'm sure someone is. Maybe.

The only thing that annoys me about writing is that I've written these Avarthrel stories and stuff since 2005... and I've gotten about two or three brief unsolicited comments on how the heck am I doing. The people whom I've asked comments from have usually only pointed out technical problems and given broad overview of "yeah, you're definitely going in the right direction with this thing".

So here I am, suffering from seasonal depression, drinking coffee at 23:01 and whining in a blog about how lonesome I feel. ...see? see? When I put it like that I start to smile right away.

I think I should just use this time for my advantage and tell what I really am looking in feedback. I've so far electred not to post some of my stuff to absolutewrite.com, even though I read the boards from time to time and sometimes even post there. That's because the share-your-work forum seems to be for people who revise stories. I don't really look for that sort of feedback. I'm looking for post-mortems.

Yeah, of course it'd be helpful to get feedback while the story isn't done, but I usually tend to only torment my friends with these things. And I usually don't ask opinions from many people anyway. It's hard for people to read the story many times and even more so to give helpful feedback while the story is not completely developed. Hmm... come to think of it, there's at least one story that's still not done because one of my friends never sent back the critique and the story sort of fizzled. *sigh*

So, from most of the people who stumble upon this text on their own, I'd appreciate post-mortems. What went right, what went wrong. No need to use fancy words. Just list big things that went right and big things that went wrong. Little details that worked, little details that shouldn't have been done. And definitely make them post-mortems in the sense of "focusing on what went wrong".

And extensive gigantic missives aren't required by all means. If you read my stories and spot anything wrong, just hit me. I like to critique people's YouTube videos by posting something along the lines of "x:xx - this reminds me..." - and with 500 character limit, YouTube won't let me write giant long bits of feedback. So even bite-size comments are fine. It works, or at least I think it works: People can look at the specific part of the video and see what I'm commenting on. This should be even easier in text. Most of the critique I get from my friends are already as notes in word processing files or scrawlings in margins. If you post in the comment forms, I can usually find the place if you just hint where the problem is.

So this is my nightly whine - a bit of a plea to encourage people to comment more and what I'm looking for.

Once it's rolling... (...it's hard to publish it properly)

2009-11-10T17:55:02Z

In Sunday, I finally finished "Once it's rolling...", a story that has been in works for a while. You can find it here in Avarthrel website, in deviantART and Scribd. Soon, hopefully, also in Elfwood.

This story has been in works quite a while. It started off as a story for my planned Flash-Fiction-a-Day 2 effort. Turns out the story just kept growing and keeping it in "flash fiction" size was not going to cut it. Some other stories also showed similar potential for hugeness, and one story ended up as a part in another story.

This is also a testament to the fact that next time I get the bright idea to improve my process and rebuild it from ground up, I think I'll reconsider it. This story was produced in relatively short amount of work, using plain old OpenOffice.org Writer. My hacked and patched-up LaTeX workflow just wasn't good enough: OpenOffice.org Writer, despite of its deficiencies as far as process goes, is actually pretty good as a word processor. I just need to figure out a way that would convert the OpenDocument file into clean HTML, then into weird hacked-up sorta-kinda-HTML some of the websites use, then into Markdown for my own website, and finally to LaTeX for PDFs. I'll have to hack together some XSLT when and if my head can take it.

Also, good news on the story front: I discovered "memoir" LaTeX document format, which produces some awesome results in fiction front, and I don't need to knife the "article" document format that much any more. Also, I figured out why TeX wasn't producing PDF metadata (it should be done via hyperref parameters) and how to use XeTeX for maximal frigging font-related awesomeness. Please see Scribd or the PDF version of the story on the website to see what it looks like. I'll probably re-do the rest of the stories using this document format when I'll get the chance.

The only big problem with this thing is that you can literally spend hours getting the output just right, hence such a late blog post...

Waiting for an orthographical miracle

2009-10-13T14:18:13Z

Long time has gone by and there's been too little good blogging from my end. But here's something, now! Here's just a few thoughts on an issue that I really don't want to put much thought into.

I wish to state emphatically one thing: Until I have an editor to tell me otherwise, my stories currently use, and shall use in the future, the official spelling standard called Weird Mutated Foreign Spelling.

]]> It may be weird that a writer of any caliber says that spelling guides are worthless, but it's happening, right here, right now. I'm saying that I'm not opening a style guide until someone specifically tells me to open a style guide.

People who have looked at my text don't think I've been consistently using American or British spelling and punctuation conventions. And they would be right on that account! I'm not British, I'm not American; I speak English as a second language. The popular culture tends to teach me American conventions; the parts of English that I learned in school taught mostly British conventions, with a good discussion of American conventions as well. When I was in school, I believe we discussed the differences, but I don't think anyone ever said which conventions we were supposed to prefer. And lately, I've realised that no one else gives a damn either!

Lately, I've been trying to standardise my spelling to honour the need for unnecessary vowels and discourage the excess use of the letter Z. My “punctuation”, however, has been largely of “this sort”, and I have been using “somewhat geek-friendly quotation marks”, where characters not part of the logical string literal are outside of the quotation mark. Double-quotes are used mostly because they are also used here (albeit ”slightly differently”). Dashes – useful for separating parenthetical ideas – have no set length preference in Finnish, hence I'm using en-dashes for most purposes, except—

—ah, we have found a good reason for their existence.

What I'm trying to get to this is this: I'm striving for consistency, and that's all that matters to me personally. I'm sure people don't have gigantic problems reading my stuff, if I only strive for some sort of consistent spelling and consistent punctuation use in my stories. I don't want the proponents of British and American spellings to go in a knife fight. They haven't figured out a clear winner after centuries, so I don't think they'll figure it out anytime soon. We, the Weird Mutants who use English as second language, just have to figure out some way to communicate until a miraculous level of consistency can be finally agreed upon.

I'd love to hear what other people think of this matter...

Spam and Freedom of Speech: A Long Late-Night Ramble

2009-08-12T21:55:16Z

(Author's note: I was not actually that sure what to do with this little essay... thing... blabbery. Since it was inspired by a thread in a writing forum, in a blogging subforum, I decided to, um, post it in a blog that I... do... about writing. Or something. It's kind of grossly off topic in regards to Avarthrel. But it certainly is on topic as far as my own writing is concerned. You can't get more writing-like text from me, no!)

]]> Since the dawn of time, spammers have been saying any attempts to curb spam is violating their freedom of speech. On the other side of the fence, this is basically same as the "I don't want to rule this blog like a tyrant" mindset: some people would just prefer everyone would be free to say what they want, even if it's annoying the hell out of everyone else.

But a person's freedom of speech doesn't mean everyone else has an unwavering duty to listen to what the person says. A person's freedom of speech also doesn't mean that everyone else has an unwavering duty to carry the messages and spread the word.

This is what things boil down to: People think of "freedom" and "duty" together. Human beings have freedoms and duties. Freedoms entail duties, right? You have the freedom, and the others have a duty?

That doesn't sound right, am I correct? But that's exactly what the argument says: freedom of speech means that other people have the duty to listen.

(This is Philosophy. And this is Bullshit. And I'm running out of coffee. Wait, I'm just getting started! Oh hoh hoh ho!)

On the flip side of a basic freedom, a basic human right, one is not supposed to find a binding requirement for the rest of humanity. True freedom can only be achieved through assuming other people are free from any causality resulting in from your freedom. In other words, you can say what you want, but that means you should not be alarmed if the crowd says "meh". You'd also better expect the owner of the medium you used to say what you said to bill you for the expenses incurred. That's their right.

So, freedoms of individuals don't entail duties for other people. There is another rule, however, which is much more applicable: power entails responsibility. People have power through free speech. With that, they have the responsibility to not annoy people through misapplied words - and to not cause problems in the process of exercising that power.

That was the big problem with the "free speech for spammers too" argument: Freedoms and duties are only related to one individual. Your freedom entails duties to you. It entails headaches for other people if you don't be careful.

Of course, freedom of speech is useless without people who listen. People who are concerned about other peoples' freedom of speech should not fight the people who have denied other people the right - or at least not until all other venues have been exhausted. In case of spam, I'm sure there usually are plenty of more suitable venues for commercial announcements that operate in a little bit less annoying manner. That, too, is a key issue in delivering messages: people want to listen to things on their terms. They like appropriate messages in appropriate contexts, delivered for appropriate purposes. Spammers fail on many of these areas.

We say things because we need to. We listen because we want to.

(I didn't study law and philosophy! A decade's worth of rubbish legal arguments from spammers is all anyone ever needs to get done some serious debate about human rights and proper online behaviour!)

A foray in webcomics: Kara the Assassin

2009-07-17T18:32:06Z

I have no idea what I was thinking, but it seems that I have started writing and drawing a webcomic. So, the first Avarthrel web comic is Kara the Assassin, or Karaydhjenna Bourejenn's most preposterous exploits for the glory of Carriglena & provocation of Thoughts. I was supposed to finish first short story featuring Kara a long time ago, but I was slacking off. But I think webcomics is a good medium for assassination fantasy fiction.

Speaking of slacking off, most of the slacking off has been caused by the fact that I've not been able to work efficiently with half of my stuff in LaTeX files and half of it in OpenDocument. Luckily, this has all been fixed now: I got a slightly beefier used laptop which can run OpenOffice.org just fine. (It also incidentally runs Windows XP, and the hard drive is too small for me to cram Ubuntu on it too...) I hope I'll be able to finish this giant bunch of unfinished stories soon!

Heading to the uncharted territory...

2009-06-22T16:17:41Z

I have a bunch of stories in the making, and I really really really need to just stop and make some sense of this whole big mess I'm in. I'm in danger of stagnation. I've tried to break the habit by writing a lot of stuff completely unrelated to Avarthrel... and it has helped somewhat. I think I'll get a few stories done this summer! Life is good again!

I really need to get the stories going. Some might say that writing stories is about going to a new unexplored and uncharted territory, but my problem is, I'm already in the uncharted territory and I bloody well should have made a map of this incident.

On a completely unrelated note, here's a drawing of mine that I finished today, incidentally also about heading to uncharted territory - Quirierle hunting an unspecified monster. Also testing deviantART embedding...

Okay, where the hells are you? by ~wwwwolf on deviant ART

Shady Characters Wreaking Havoc in Animal Crossing

2009-05-19T13:54:39Z

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?

A few links to Scribd

2009-05-19T12:34:05Z

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.

Musings about maps and measurement

2009-05-05T12:55:18Z

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...