Fantasist’s Scroll

Oy vey!  It’s been a long, long time since I wrote here!

Frankly, it’s been a long time for a lot of reasons, but, mostly, because my creative endeavors have moved in other directions.  For one thing, I’ve been doing more photography, which you can find here, as well as working on at least two other sites; Diary of a Network Geek and something a little more personal, JKHoffman.com

But, I’ve also been working at my day job a lot.  And, that, of course, combined with a general malaise and chaotic busyness, have all led to a pretty negative impact on my personal spirituality.  I’d like to say I’ve been seeking that, but, frankly, I’ve just been a little too burned out for even that much personal growth.

So, as a result, this blog, this site, this entire creative idea has languished.
And, honestly, it probably will continue to languish.  If not for the history of it, and some of the back-end server details that no one cares about besides me and my webhost, I’d have shut the whole thing down a long, long time ago.
In any case, if you want to see what else I’m up to, check out one of those other sites.

Thanks!

The conlang scripts may not have been the problem after all!

Perhaps, when we do track down the issue, I’ll be able to reenable some, if not all, of my conlang apps for your future enjoyment! Be sure to watch this space for news!!

By all rights, this blog should be dead.

Frankly, the entire website is so old and out of date and willfully not maintained that I’m surprised there’s any traffic to it.  But, there is.  And with any large volume of people, there are always those who take advantage and push free resources beyond their intended use.  Well, that’s just what happened here.

One of the many things I originally did with this site was dabble in conlangs, or CONstructed LANGuages.  Toward that end, I created or modified several Perl scripts to help me generate words that sounded authentic and consistent according to some linguistic rules.  When I was doing this, very few people were yet.  Now, there are many, many more people who offer language generation programs and scripts, but I think I was one of the first people to have free, interactive web pages that would let the neophyte conlanger generate or manipulate their language.  In fact, I’m not sure how many there are even today.  Hopefully, there are a lot more who can take the burden of people ramming quite literally gigabytes worth of data through their free resource.  I hope they have their own server, though, since when people did that here, it crashed the server I was on.  Yeah, that’s right, people ran so much data through my little programs that it crashed the server.  In spite of me asking them not to do it, then building in some fairly significant limitations on how much data could be sent to the script at once, a small percentage of the users, who I have come to think of as abusers, still managed to crash my webhost’s server.

So, sadly, my conlang scripts are starting to go off-line.  One bye one, like fading stars, they’re being pummeled off the internet by people who never appreciated them, apparently.
But, what really makes me sad is that so many people who did NOT abuse them, but used my little scripts to enhance and improve their writing or leasure time won’t be able to use them all any more.  Those innocent bystanders will simply have to do without because of the greed of a few pushy, obnoxious people who had to test the limits of the system.

So, to those of you who played nice and were friendly and enjoyed my little conlang scripts, I’m sorry.  I’m sorry, but now when they start to cause problems for my provider, I’ll have to take them off-line, one by one.
I hope you enjoyed them half as much as I did while they were here.

It’s the birthday of one of the most prolific writers of the 20th century, Isaac Asimov, who was born in Petrovichi, Russia in 1920. He came with his family to the United States when he was three years old and his parents opened a candy shop in Brooklyn. Issac grew up to become a professor of biochemistry at the Boston University School of medicine and in 1950 he published his first novel Pebble in the Sky.

About the same time Asimov took part in writing a textbook for medical students and he found that he loved explaining complicated things in ordinary language, and so he set out to write about science for the general public, in language they would understand. He said, “Little by little my science writing swallowed up the rest of me.”
Asimov developed a regimen of working ten hours a day, seven days a week, producing between two and five thousand words a day. Asimov’s method was to write a book about any subject that interested him but which he didn’t fully understand. He used writing as a way of teaching himself about everything.
By 1970 Asimov had written more than a hundred books and he began branching out into areas other than science. He wrote about nuclear physics and organic chemistry, history, Greek mythology, astronomy, religion, in addition to his collections of limericks, mystery novels, autobiography and science fiction. By the time of his death in 1992 he had published more than 400 books.

Three birthdays today, all brought to you by way of the Writer’s Almanac.

Today is the birthday of Carl Jung, who was born in Kesswil, Switzerland in 1875. His father was a pastor who was losing his faith. This so shocked Jung as a boy that he decided to become a scientist instead of a minister in order to scientifically prove that religion was important. He is considered the founder of analytic psychology.
More importantly to writers, he noticed that myths and fairytales from all kinds of different cultures have certain similarities, which he called “archetypes”. He believed that these universal archetypes come from a collective unconscious that all humans share. He said that if people get in touch with these archetypes in their own lives, they will be happier and healthier.
He and Sigmund Freud were contemporaries and they even collaborated for a few years, but finally decided that they disagreed with each other’s ideas. Jung thought Freud was too obsessed with sex, and Freud thought Jung was too obsessed with God.

It’s also the birthday of science-fiction writer Aldous Huxley, who was born in Surrey, England on this day in 1894. Huxley wanted to be a scientist like his grandfather, Thomas Henry Huxley, but a childhood disease left him almost blind, so he became a writer. His first successful novel was Point Counter Point, which was an extremely ambitious book. Huxley decided that his next book would be something light. He had been reading some H.G. Wells and thought it would be interesting to try to write something about what the future might be like. The result was Brave New World, about a future in which most human beings are born in test-tube factories, genetically engineered to belong in one of five castes: Alphas, Betas, Gammas, Deltas, and Epsilons. There are no families; people have sex all the time and never fall in love, and they keep themselves happy by taking a drug called “soma.”
Brave New World was one of the first novels to predict the future existence of genetic engineering, test-tube babies, anti-depression medication, and virtual reality.

And, finally it’s also the birthday of playwright George Bernard Shaw, born in Dublin, Ireland in 1856. He wrote dozens of plays, but he’s best known for his play Pygmalion, about what happens when a phonetician named Henry Higgins teaches a cockney flower girl named Eliza Doolittle to pass as a lady.
Shaw had an opinion about everything, and eventually became famous more for his personality than for his writing. He was a vegetarian and a pacifist, he didn’t drink, and he believed Christmas should be abolished. In 1925, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. He died 25 years later in 1950 at the age of 94.
He is now one of the most widely quoted writers in the English language.
He said, “I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and besides, the pig likes it.” And he said, “All great truths begin as blasphemies.” And he said, “Youth is a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.”

Happy birthday, Bond!
Well, it’s more accurate to wish his creator, Ian Flemming, happy birthday.
Yes, today is Ian Flemming‘s birthday, according to the Wikipedia. Born in London, England in 1908, Flemming wanted to be a diplomat, but he failed the Foreign Office examination and decided to go into journalism. He worked for the Reuters News Service in London, Moscow, and Berlin, and then during World War II, he served as the assistant to the British director of naval intelligence. After the war, he bought a house in Jamaica, where he spent his time fishing and gambling and bird watching. He started to get bored, so he decided to try writing a novel about a secret agent. He named the agent James Bond after the author of a bird-watching book.
After a several books that sold less and less well, Flemming started to write with the movies in mind. He wrote more sensational books filled with a larger than “normal” helping of psychopathic killers, beautiful women and bizarre plots to conquer the world. Though his books began to sell better, it was only years later that the movie industry took an interest, thus sealing the hopes of budding novelists everywhere of selling the movie rights to their novel.

Well, happy birthday anyway.

Well, it seems my antiquated Perl code is just a little too much for my new webhost’s servers to handle.

My web implementation of the Zompist Sound Change Applier almost killed their server this past weekend.  It uses a CPAN library that someone created, based on the Zompist code, and it’s getting a little “long in the tooth”, as Perl libraries go, so I suspect that has something to do with it.  So, in any case, the end result is that I had to take it off-line.  And, I don’t think it will ever be back.  I suppose, if I can find a way to port it to PHP, which is doubtful, it might make a return.  But, honestly, I wouldn’t count on it.

What I will do, in the next week or so, is post my code here, slightly cleaned, for you all to use and enjoy.  I won’t have time to support it, but I will make it available to anyone who wants to use it.  Also, if I can find it, I’ll make available the original Perl code that is NOT designed to run on the web, but on a local machine.  That way, if there’s some brave soul who’s willing to take that code and make it available to run from their website, they won’t have to do too much work to get a minimally functional system.
So, watch this space for forthcoming code!

Well, just weeks after announcing that all my conlang language machines are back on-line, I’ve had to take one down.  My Dialect Maker seems to be a CPU hog on the server.  Also, in spite of coding it so that it should only run one instance at a time, it somehow got two loaded on my ISP’s server.

So, I’ve tweaked the code an I’m waiting for my ISP to approve it before I load it up.  But, I have to tell you, if the sound changer is the only thing that has problems, I may just let it go.  It uses an old library for Perl that’s probably out of date.  Then, I hope, it would be easier to convert everything else to a PHP script/page/whatever and not have to rely on Perl.  I love using Perl, but it can be a resource hog.

Anyway, stay tuned for more news.