Forums → Art, Music, and Writing → Yesterday and Tomorrow

YAT120916

I bore easy. Monotony is often not worth the time when there are things to discover, things to learn, things to do that excite the mind. Boredom is the brother of Freedom. Gantic 365 starts October 1 as part of a 365 challenge, writing 100 words a day for 365 days. I'll probably bore of that, but I'm starting with a walk through the alphabet, which will take up 26 days, 5 days of something, break for NaNo, which still counts, and shoot through to the end of September. The easy part is that I often write nothing. Sometimes I don't have a point. I write to write. I write to hear the sounds of words. If there's one thing to know about me, it's that I love words. I love the sound of words. I often do have a general idea of where I want to go but what directs me is what the next word or next sentence should look and sound like.

Here's a thinker: How is an unclean uncle like a pita pit?
The same way I, a gardenia, garden.
The same way I eat CA licorice calico rice?
The same way the rabbit sears the rabbit's ears?
The same way the rabbi tears the rabbit ears off his old TV?
The same way as I would a blinking goblin king go?

Yeah, that doesn't sound great. It's something I'm working on and hoping to find something more complex in the way letters are split than words made of other words. Anyone is welcome to join me on a word adventure.

nobody ever comes to this section. and they miss all of gantics stuff! its so touching..............

People read, but they don't respond. It's not like I'm adding much here anyway. It doesn't wow me, so I don't expect it to wow anyone else.

13

Fbzr guvatf ner qbar whfg gb or pyrire, abg pyrire gb or pyrire, ohg boyvdhr gb or boyvdhr, sbezvat frys-cnebql naq pevgvdhr. Bu, ubj V qb fb ybir gur nssrpgngvbaf bs pyrirearff. Jung n jbaqebhf ercynprzrag sbe jvg! Sbe vafgnapr, gur gvgyr bs guvf ragel unf ohg bar frzoynapr bs eryngvba jvgu gur ragel vgfrys. Naq gur fhowrpg znggre! Frys-ersreragvny naq fhpu! Gur nhqnpvgl! Gur ebzc va cbzc! Pregnva gernpurebhf ornhgl znfxvat htyvarff znfxrq va n pnpbcubabhf whkgncbfvgvba bs yrggref bs frrzvatyl abafrafvpny qrzrnabe. Bu ubj qrzher lbhe ernpgvba! Jung vf vg V unir qbar? Anhtug. Lrg gur jurry gheaf. Ubj sne jvyy vg ebyy jvgu vzcrghf naq ab ratvar?

A Preface

The Alphabet series is a walk through the English alphabet. It is written with a feeling of a feeling based on perceptions of the letter. 'A' will most assuredly be the beginning in more ways than one and 'Z' will be at the end. It isn't meant to have depth. It is simply 26 musings on 26 symbols. Mostly, it will be related to words beginning with the letter (and not words containing the letter) grouped under general ideas, possibly under a word starting with a different letter. What it is, in essence, is ascribing an idea to a symbol.

Did not post yesterday, don't have one for today. A day behind, not bad.

A
A is the beginning. At hand are the apparent alpha and ante and all associated words, but beginnings build beyond 'a' being the base or 'ante' being before. An appetizer and an aperitif arouse an appetite. Allure attracts attention. Appellations assign the origin of wine. Abscissae appear before ordinates in Cartesian coordinates. Alliteration always initiates (anticipation of agreeable aural aggregates). Now if that didn't provide a good kick to end this, I'll end with anadiplosis, a good word to learn, where the next beginning is the previous end. And to help you remember, take a listen to this and turn the lights out now.

Yeah, it figures I wouldn't get very far.

SIPPYCUpS
Tomorrow is a day of wonder. A wonder for the word. It is not simply a matter of how words sounds that makes it beautiful. It is also the way it looks, the font, the size, the color. I occasionally enjoy playing with fonts, size, color, and juxtaposition with images as in the image below. A mock up for SIPPYCUpS! I think it at least deserves a mention of merit. Repetition, repeatability, a pattern, symmetry also make for beautiful things, but that is something for another tomorrow. I don't know much about design. I've never taken a class in design, well not graphic design. (I can further play on technicalities but that digresses too far.) As with words, as with writing, the way my mind works is by association, of words, of images, of ideas. I do what looks and feels right. I think "What is this? What does this relate to?" The acronym came first and it must before I could fiddle with several fonts until I found the right one. The color came later (and that was the hard part because I started with too many colors). The star is a gold star, a callback to early childhood school years. (And of course the SIPPYCUpS acronym, a reference to toddlerhood.) The star contains an arrowhead pointing upwards, behind the Up in SIPPYCUpS. This is an intentional upwardness to it, a positivity, but I can't be sure that translates well to the customer. Maybe it works psychologically, but I won't be able to know. The font colors were tweaked until it looked just right. Perhaps I should have gone with green, the color that usually denotes something positive (as with the stockmarket), but I do enjoy the azureness of the color I chose, ever upward into the wild blue yonder. (Of course, that blueness has its limits, but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves. Anyways, I still can't decide if the space above the '' is bothering me. Does it bother you now? You're welcome.

I am so completely lost, and that's why I love reading all of your threads. Don't think people aren't interested because we don't reply, we're just wonderfully confused. Keep us that way!

Hardly anyone understands me when I don't fill in the blanks and spell things out. Nobody does when I do.

I haven't been making posts as frequently as I used to because I haven't anything to post.

Yesterday and Tomorrow

It all started a bit over four years ago. Just two days proud. Between then and now, things had changed. The air used to be thicker, with everything. You could butter your toast waving it around. Time stands still for no man, Figment or Gamer. You may find a hyperlink to the past but you visit a Stranger. It's never the same river twice. Like a Gamer and a Figment, Yesterday and Tomorrow stand still and never the twain shall meet. Today is the Imaginarium, shaping the flux of tomorrow into the form of Yesterday.
Do you know who I was? You still don't. I'm the one with the hat.

I had something else written up which I will post some other time.

Om at lære dansk
Learning new languages is like learning new perspectives. The rate of acquisition is simply a matter of practice, immersion, and starting from the ground up. From first impressions, Danish appears to be a very stripped down language. There are fewer tenses than in English and for the most part, inflection is simple, as is the grammar. (I still need to find my way around en and et.) The hard part of learning Danish, obvious to anyone who doesn't speak natively, is the pronunciation. København does not exactly sound like Copenhagen and hedder isn't header but more like hella, as in "I am hella fly." ("Jeg er meget fantastisk!" or maybe it's "E am hella flew.&quot Scratch that. The hardest part of learning Danish is trying to find a way in which my sense of humor would actually work. I like a bit of the absurd, over-the-top, and extra groanworthy. Perhaps if I can wring out the fast-talking sarcasm of Danish culture and wield it with my rabbity wits, I might be able to swing the language in my favor. Maybe. I won't have my fingers crossed. Now how would I write that in Danish. Jeg vil ikke har krydset mine fingre. Hmm.

This doesn't read right for some reason. I'm missing a word or have a word too many or maybe just a differently inflected word.

Irreguclarity

For fear that things may change is not a reason not to act. Regret is a self-cutting blade forged from lost chances. Unexpected outcomes of chances taken, and changes foisted upon us, forge blades of nostalgic steel that cut just the same, but we pleasure in its release of endorphins. There are few apparent constants in life and fewer that were always constant. Each memory is anchored to the day, but it is a buoy in an ever-changing sea. We may slip, we may fall, but we will rise with every fault, with every error, with every misstep, but regret is a rope that ties us down. And there is no wisdom without experience. But there is no experience without wisdom. Perhaps some doors should never be opened, but curiosity gets the better of us and we itch with regret or flood with nostalgia, because we never know if the next door contains the happiness to dope the pain of ever-cutting blades.

Writing Text Adventure Logic Was Never More Fun (and Never Made More Sense)

If there is a better way to appreciate the nuances of (the English) language than parsing sentences, then someone had better tell me. Parsing a simple Subject-Verb-Object like "I did it" is easy, because I just did it. Programming a parser is a little trickier. Programming a parser that tells the difference between intransitive, monotransitive, and ditransitive verbs is even trickier. You can go. You can get, but you have to get something. You can put, but you have to put something somewhere. Then there's verbs like read. You can read. You can read something. You can read someone something. The orders of words is definitely important, but then you tack on adjectives and adverbs and prepositions and prepositions and feel lucky that English doesn't have many gendered nouns.

Back to text adventure logic, which was not mentioned anywhere but the title. What do you do if you want to get something? What if there were two similar items and you only wanted one? What if there were many of an item and you wanted a certain amount? What if it were in a container? What if that container were closed? What if that container were in another container that was closed? How far can you nest containers before it becomes ridiculous? Would you still be able to put, say, a picture in a locket in a small pouch in a large bag in your loot sack on a book on a table? Ridiculous, I know, but lets assume you could. You'd have to break down the command to &quotut" &quoticture" " "in" "locket" "in" "small box" "in" "large bag" "in" "loot sack" "on" "book" "on" "table" and after recognizing it as a put command, split the command into to parts: the what and the where by way of prepositions. To find the what, you'd have to go through the "ins" in reverse because you have to have a loot sack and in that loot sack would be a large bag and in that large bag would be a small box and in that small box would be a locket and in that locket would be a picture. To find the where you'd go through the same process. (All of this, of course, ignores the fact that you'd also need to change something else so that the picture is now on the book rather than in the locket.) What if there were more than one picture, locket, pouch, bag, book, and table? What if the locket is closed, the small box locked, and large bag are closed! Should we allow automated opening and unlocking and closing and locking? Or do we make the user manually do it? Or do we make the user manually remove each container from the previous container to teach them the folly of nesting so many containers? (Then again, nested containers are safer from pickpockets, unless they steal the container containing the container [unless they can't by way of game logic because no pickpocket steals a container containing something but an item in a container be it a non-container item or an empty container item]! But it's always smart to watch any pickpocket that enters or outright kill them if you can get away with it.) It's ridiculous, I know, but overcomplicating a problem can be a simple way to find a solution for a general case if you have no idea what you're doing in the first place. However, I'd never think to intentionally do something like this or even more complicated than requiring the user to unlock, open, get, and put in that order (requiring a hold command is a little bit much and extremely repetitive [as get doesn't put it in your hand but straight to your inventory (except in the rare case that the item is sticky or cursed [then you'd need to unstick or uncurse it (but maybe sticky items should be able to be picked up with the proper equipment)])] when moving something somewhere else, unless your hands are full carrying a bulky item [but not sword and shield or torch or whatever] or you actually need to be holding the object) rather than doing it with one simple put x in y in z on j on k on l, because you have to think about what your actions are, but not everyone actively thinks about what they're doing when they open their inventory, select an item, and perform actions with/on it in a game with graphics and mouse controls. I still prefer a good text adventure.

I like the difference between writing 2:11, eleven past two, etc. They each evoke a different type of clock.

In the Lobby
He crumpled the tissue and then smoothed it again in his lap. His palms were turning red from the repetition. It was 243, only three minutes and twenty-two seconds since the last time he checked. He slid forward on the bench and shifted his weight to the right when the button on his back pocket caught between the gap of the wooden slats. The wall behind him was still warm. Four feet away to his left was a trash receptacle, an easy distance. He balled up the tissue, launched it, and missed. The tissue bounced and rolled a foot away. He stood up, walked over to the tissue, picked it up, dropped it into the trash receptacle, walked back to the bench, sat down, and started rummaging through his pockets. It was 209, only two minutes and twenty-six minutes since the last time he checked.

Iairid
Tingcomple het ctproje asw ernev syea, utb it asw het lyon ngthi epingke me nggoi. Het elingfe of otn owingkn rewhe to go asw iningdra on het ulso, so I rtedsta a ewn onmissi, neo atth ldwou epke me sybu orf het stre of my feli. It asw telycomple sicalnonsen. I asw neddetermi to ndfi het itslim of Iairid, utb Iairid idd otn stexi in het onalconventi sesen. It adh lli-neddefi lesru, stalmo ryarbitra neso, utb it asw sepurpo, it asw feli. Atwh dema sesen, dema sesen. Rethe asw meso erord nda atth asw rtingcomfo. Neo ayd I deddeci to resha my ndingsfi thwi eroth lepeop, utb het aningme asw stlo onup emth. Eyth aws no aningme in Iairid. Orf a lewhi eraft, I anbeg to nkthi I asw het lyon neo how ldcou omfath tsi teintrica exitycompl ilunt I ndfou eranoth how ldcou ees tsi tybeau and Iairid mebeca ntirreleva.

A salty tear ran down from his eye onto his furry cheek, only to roll onto a whisker and plop despondently onto the keyboard.

Gantic stared blankly at the monitor shining brightly in his face.

Why didn't they understand? It was all so simple. Why could no one hear his throbbing heart's cry for help?

A sudden fit of rage overtook him, and with a mute squeal, Gantic raised his little bunny paws and smashed them down on the keyboard.

That felt good.

Raising them once more, he began pounding at the keyboard, tears flowing, buck teeth bared in helpless anger.

After a while, he sat back, utterly spent. Looking once more at the monitor, he saw a jumbled mess of text that he'd created in his fit. Vowels, consonants, and spaces jockeyed for position before him, and yet even as Gantic sneered in disgust at this abomination, he noticed a word, emboldened, at the top. Iairid. And he began to read.

After many hours, or seconds if he were a good reader, Gantic wiped a tear from his face with the back of a paw. This was it. This is what he'd been striving for, been looking for, had spent his youth and old age pining for.

Finally, they would understand.