I’ve been reading The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B.White (ISBN 0205191584) and have to admit I am guilty of many fallacies described in the book. Although I have read parts of the book in the past, it never stuck with me. This time, I will try to apply it more. Thus, I will do a challenge where I take a section from the book and try to actively apply it in my writing for a week.

This week, I will focus on section 13, Make the paragraph a unit of composition.

So, I’ve been pretty happy with Oddmuse. It was simple, very easy to install, very much a Wiki, but also had quite a number of modules that could be used to customize it. So all in all, I like Oddmuse. However, when trying to run it on my webhost, I’ve encountered more problems than I knew could exist. After struggling with it for a couple of days, I decided to give some other Wikis a try. Unfortunately, it seems that Oddmuse is addictive and all these fancy Wikis are just distasteful to me now. Not being able to run Oddmuse, I instead turned to Usemod, from which Oddmuse forked. The look is great, being pretty much the same as Oddmuse, and it has most of the features available for Oddmuse.

However, I’m getting increasingly frustrated with how difficult customizing it is. It’s one Perl script and any extensions are done using the tried and true method of patching. While a little too hackish for my tastes, that’s fine. However, what I hate is that most patches seem to be written for an older version, so I have to manually edit the script and hope things work :\

I don’t know, I’m torn between installing something like DokuWiki which is customizable, fancy, has many plugins available, etc., and UseMod, which seems to be very true to the ideals behind Wikis and appeals to my hacker side.

I love the breadth and depth of Asimov’s books, how he seems to take a lot of things into account and create a world with a lot of verisimilitude, even though it’s definitely very fantastic (Arthur C. Clark has the same power, or I suppose all the great sci-fi authors). However, one thing has been bothering for a couple of weeks now since I finished reading “Foundation and Empire“, namely the blaster pistols! In a world that seems to be well thought out, blasters are completely insane and impractical things that nobody in their right mind would use as the main, or even the only, weapon. The following contains a pretty nasty spoiler, so read at your own risk.

Bayta, face frozen white, lifted her blaster and shot, with an echoing clap of noise. From the waist upward, Mis was not, and a ragged hole was in the wall behind. From numb fingers, Bayta’s blaster dropped to the floor.

I know there is some more elaborate description of the blasters in one of the previous books, but I haven’t the energy to look it up now. However, even from this short passage one can see that here we have a hand-held weapon that apparently pulverizes not only flesh, but also stone and metal. Who in their right mind would use such a weapon for anything other than terrorism? I can understand it if it pulverized flesh/bone, in which case it would be pretty useful for the criminal elements, as there would be no body left. Even then, however, whoever was using the blaster would be exposed to very horrific images of half people, decapitation, etc. One would think that in the future we would move to the less gory, not more so than our current projectile weapons! For law enforcement to use such weapons seems very unlikely, since any evidence found on the body would be destroyed along with it.

Then there is the matter of destroying stone and metal. Why in the world would a space-faring society have hand-held guns readily available and it seems like exclusive used by everybody that would create big holes in inanimate matter? One such shot and everybody on the spaceship, or at least in the shooter’s vicinity, is likely going to be dead. In the passage above, that blaster probably took out a chunk of the Imperial Library, which means precious books lost forever. I wouldn’t even want to think what would happen if a blaster fight between criminals and police broke out anywhere on Trantor. The damage would probably be more extensive than many acts of terrorism.

In summary, I feel like the blaster is completely insane and I don’t understand why Isaac Asimov would include something so stupid in his books.

So, for the past week and a half I have been trying to create a unique world for my D&D campaign. My wife thinks I’m nuts and she might very well be right in this assessment. The thing that is rather funny, I think, is that I’m trying to use pseudo-science to make my world different from Earth as far as the appearances are concerned, but similar otherwise. For example my world (codenamed RP1) is somewhat larger than Earth, orbits a much cooler star (K0 star category), and has two moons. The trick here is that the life on this planet is very similar to that on Earth, so some things will have to be the same.

Right now I’m working on the moons and it’s proving to be a headache. First, I want one moon to be much larger in appearance than Luna from Earth (about 0.5 degree viewing angle). However, I also want it to have an orbit of around three days. Additionally, it mustn’t have too great of a tidal effect on the planet, otherwise all kinds of things would go nuts, including planet’s rotation around its axis. And now I read some study that a planet a little larger than Earth or Venus would get completely disrupted by the tidal pull of its satellite. In short, it’s all way too complicated :\ I may need to either overlook some things or just go back to Earth-like planet.

It seems like Oddmuse was indeed a good choice, since there exists a module that converts CamelCase to Camel Case when the links are displayed. So, in effect, I get the best of both worlds. I have Accidental Linking without having to see things like TownOfArpet.

I’ve decided to try to organize my various hand-written notes and text files related to the D&D campaign I’m running on a Wiki. I’ve set up a nice little Oddmuse Wiki, which was relatively painless and seems to offer the right mix of features.

So far I have two problems. One is that including various images is rather painful and not very pretty, as each image either needs to be uploaded to a web server (perhaps something like Flickr will be useful here) to be inlined or uploaded and made into a WikiPage. I’m going to take a look at the bloated MediaWiki beast and see if the name implies some sort of advanced alternate media handling.

The other problem is, and likely only because I’m myself and like to fuss about the details, is the choice between Free Links and CamelCase. It seems like both have their pros and cons and there is no clear winner, it seems. Most Wikis, as far as I know, now prefer to use the Free Links, but that doesn’t mean I have to follow that trend. The main reason I like CamelCase is AccidentalLinking, which is one of the reasons I went with a Wiki to begin with. On the other hand, the single word and apostrophe problems might be significant. I think for the time being I’m going to try to use CamelCase whenever possible and only use Free Links when absolutely necessary (such as when dealing with apostrophes in names like O’Reilly or acronyms).

I’m hoping this will help me be more organized and will make it easier to find stuff.

Today, for whatever reason, I have been extremely frustrated with all things D&D. It just doesn’t make sense and I just want to throw it away and either switch to a more sane system or come up with my own. I hate prestige classes, I hate the spells, I hate the language system, I hate classes in general, I hate the skills it has. In short, I really, really don’t like D&D right now :\ The problem with that is that I DM for a D&D game and changing everything is just going to frustrate the players who, for the most part, don’t mind D&D so much.

I’m once again contemplating starting a MUSH/MUD and developing something that makes sense…

I’m working on a believable world for my D&D campaign and the subject of a calendar has been bothering me for a while now.

I don’t want to simply change the month names and day names and presto, I have a new calendar. I want it to be different from the Earth calendars and I want it to be believable and consistent. However, simply changing the number of days in a year seems unwise, since that has other implications. Earth solar year has roughly 365 days, meaning that the planet rotates around its axis 365 times while it circles around the sun once. If there are fewer days, that would mean that either the planet is closer to the sun (hence hotter) or rotates more slowly (thus day and night last longer than on Earth). Both seem to be important concepts that cannot be simply changed, as they will have an impact on the plant and animal life on the planet.

It seems like the easiest way to change the calendar like this is to simply change the number of months. There are 365 days in a year, but maybe there are 18 months, 20 days each, and then a 19th month of five days that is considered holy? That would make things different, but still save me from considering all the implications of non-Earth planet. Of course, 18 months is a lot and it’s not as useful as 12 months. You can’t have a quarter of a year. A dozen is a very nice number indeed, since it can be divided evenly by 2, 3, and 4. The next such number seems to be 24, being divisible by 2, 3, and 4.

In short, I’m back to square one

So, I’m reading Foundation and Empire again and I am at a point where two distinct dialects are presented. To me, they sound wholly different and I’m not sure what exactly makes them so different.

Dialect 1:

“Now, sure I meant no harm. I am a stranger here, and it’s been said I am of addled wits; yet there is something in a face that I can read. Behind this lady’s fairness, there is a heart that’s kind, and that would help me in my trouble for all I speak so boldly.”

Dialect 2:

“There’s no use being annoyed at his silly way of talking. That’s just his dialect; and our speech is probably as strange to him.”

“What is your trouble? You’re not worried about the guard, are you? He won’t bother you.”

Dialect 1:

“Oh, no, not he. He’s but a windlet that blows the dust about my ankles. There is another that I flee, and he is a storm that sweeps the worlds aside and throws them plunging at each other. A week ago, I ran away, have slept in city streets, and hid in city crowds. I’ve looked in many faces for help in need. I find it here.”

My wife doesn’t seem to see much of a difference between the two and I’m wondering what exactly makes them so different to me. Dialect 1 is very sing-song to me, very poetic, while Dialect 2 is prosaic and mundane.