Creativity of the day

[Jipí]

That's awesome! Any chance of getting a few samples? Much interest flows forth from my attention gland!

I've given up on fontification. It's too much work. Getting the letters into a .ttf file is easy and rather quickly done, but making it work, meh.

[EDIT] Well, writing by hand it is then …



... far from perfect. It reads "Edareng telbyamanas / bata sas ang manga / tahanay sapayeri." (This is a short example that I'm writing by hand.")

[King of My Own Niche]

Neat!

Here's a little something I photoshopped (I laugh in defiance of the "Proper Usage" pdf at the Adobe website insisting that I use the phrase "enhanced with Adobe® Photoshop® software"). Bonus points to anyone who can identify the musician without clicking on the link.

Original

[Jipí]

lbdIW.jpg – very meaningful indeed!

[King of My Own Niche]

I'm afraid I'm not twigging to your vibes.

[Jipí]

[Adobe® Photoshop® enhanced blurry photo of some guitarist] → right-click → "Show image" → URL in address bar

[King of My Own Niche]

Ah, that's what I thought you meant. I meant the link to the original image. It's the word "original" above the picture; it's in bold, underlines itself when you mouse over it. Typical hyperlink behavior.

[Colonel Cathcart]

I'm playing with an abugida for my conlang Turo. I've never done a conscript before, and it's kind of fun - I wasn't originally intending to actually do anything with it, but I think I might keep it.

This is a fact sheet about South Africa. It's mostly just names, not really interesting enough to transliterate, gloss, and translate - just something to get a feel for how it looks.

turo.png (99.66 KiB) Viewed 5232 times

Believe it or not, this writing system shares a common ancestor with our own beloved alphabet: Phoenician (I'm not sure yet, but I think Turo is set somewhere in Europe in a world where the Indo-Europeans never made it over the Dnieper for whatever reason). Letters were turned and flipped and stylized over time, the consonants took an inherent vowel /a/ because Turo is mostly CV, and variant letter forms developed to accommodate diacritics. For example, the first and last letters on the top line are the two variants of K (derived, of course, from Phoenician kaf). The last is the independent form /ka/, and the first is the carrier form with a vowel diacritic, reading /ku/ (if you're wondering, "South Africa" in Turo is Kujallis-Afrika). Besides non-/a/ vowels, diacritics can indicate things like phoneme length, syllable closure, and modifications to represent foreign sounds. There are ligatures for common consonant clusters, and even a few logograms and morphemograms* to indicate grammatical functions like number, case, tense, person, and morphological derivations.

*Basically, the principle of Turo orthography is that morphology is immutable, so morphemograms are graphemes used to maintain the integrity of a grammatical/derivational morpheme when it may otherwise be obscured by phonology. For example: the thing on the top line that looks like a backwards katakana /ka/ is actually /ne/, but it's used only when that /ne/ is the morpheme -ne used to derive adjectives from nouns. Here it's in its graded form /s/, but that's not reflected in writing - the grapheme can be read /ne/ or /s/ or /su/ depending on its morphophonological environment, the whole point is it represents the underlying morpheme -ne in whatever phonological form. When /ne/ is not the morpheme -ne - i.e. when it's just an incidental phoneme sequence within another morpheme - it's written as ordinary N with the diacritic for /e/.

[dhok]

Scenes from a Waffle House at 1 AM

The wind roared over the vast, cool plains of North Dakota that April night, a light sprinkling of spring rain feeding the wildflowers and the newly planted wheat fields; the little, half-abandoned town of New Stockholm stood silent, its few inhabitants taking a rest from their little run-down lives in their little run-down houses on little run-down beds, save for one exception: the denizens of the local Waffle House.

New Stockholm's other restaurants, its seedy motel and even its general store had left with the prairie wind, but the Waffle House had not. The truckers came in off the interstate from Minneapolis to Seattle to eat a greasy plate of scrambled eggs and bacon consisting more of fat than of meat, and they never left. The night shift was a constant fixture as well: two widows named Phyllis and Wendy who had nowhere else to seek employment and a teenage good-for-nothing by the name of Zachary whose meth habit required him to hold down some sort of a job until, in the pioneer spirit of enterprise that had always marked these parts of America, he could start his own lab. The greasy spoon's lightened beacon of squares spelling out WAFFLE HOUSE stood as a monument to the vast wastes around it, as inviting and visible as the Pharos and as impenetrable as the Pyramids, commanding the inhabitants of New Stockholm to look on their own works-- their general stores, their farms and their little houses, many of which had long since fallen into neglect--and despair. Nobody of any consequence wanted to live in New Stockholm; only the elderly and the hopeless, abandoned by progress, clung to its homesteads.

Nobody, that is, save for four people. On any given night at the New Stockholm Waffle House, beside desperate and perhaps disturbed truckers named Jimbo making passes at Phyllis and Zachary shooting up a portion of the personal stash he kept in the long-since decommissioned charity donations box, there also sat four people with typewriters at a table long since reserved for them, as it was most nights. They were an incongruous sight next to the caffeine-addled truck drivers: a man in his late teens in a beret, a turtleneck and jeans, another man of the same age in a wool cap and a pipe, a woman in her early twenties with short dark hair and sunglasses, and a fashionably dressed man in tight jeans about a decade older than the rest of them. The first three wrote various pieces and just barely managed to scrape by; the fourth too often chipped in to make their ends meet, since he had a steady job writing pornographic novels with titles such as The Italian Billionaire's Pregnant Secretary for middle-aged upper-class women in their third marriage.

On this particular night, it was clear that the little clique of alcoholic intellectuals were the masters of the diner. Two truckers who introduced themselves as “Darryl” and “Warren” ordered traditional meals of grease with a side of pancakes, and a man named Timmy with visibly collapsed veins made a delivery for Zachary, but otherwise the Waffle House was silent save for the clickety-clack of typewriters and the sizzle of the griddles.

"Stephan," the man in the beret said to the man in the pipe, "did you ever get that article on rural poverty and collectivization for that underground Communist mag written?"

"I'm working on it now," he replied. "I have to actually go out into the town to do research on the people here to write it well, which I don't feel like doing..."

"Do you ever go out during the day?" interjected the woman.

"I crash at Carl's place during daylight hours, you know that," he said, pointing to their older companion. "Besides, I've got that novel I'm working on."

"Your magnum opus?" asked Carl.

"You betcha," he said, pulling out what appeared to be a 500-page manuscript. "This is Part One of three. You've never seen it, so I'll pass it around- though I think Millie's seen some preliminary drafts."

"I hated it."

"You might not now."

There was silence- a terrible, desolate silence- for an hour or two as the others leafed their way through it, marking it up in places, muttering to each other, and generally having quizzical looks. Stephan continued to drink his coffee and write. At the end of the long, silent period, Carl looked up.

"Stephan," he said quietly, "I write romance novels for a living- bad ones, as those are the only ones that sell, but romance novels nonetheless- and I can tell you right now nobody will buy this, nobody will publish this, nobody will read this and it'll be fifteen hundred pages of your life that you'll never get back. It's as dry as War and Peace and about twice as long. I mean hell, man," -he pointed to a section he had marked out with pencil- "you spend seventy pages just on this guy's thoughts over the period of an hour. Joyce can pull it off, but you can't. This isn't even a tale of tragic love, it's a tale of tragic...tragic..." He stared at it for a minute. "This is a tale of tragic sexual repression or something. Look, crushes are fine, for emo kids who write poetry, but you can't make novels out of them..."

"More coffee, Wendy, keep it coming," shouted Stephan. "Rhys?"

"Carl's right. You're not fifteen anymore, Stephan. You need to make a living. Do what Carl does. Write stuff you can make money off of, even if you're not that fond of it. I mean, pfft,"--at this he flipped through the manuscript, "if you look at THIS-- hold on, what's this?"

He pulled out a piece of paper that was very sparsely marked up compared to the rest of the manuscript.

"'I dedicate this book to Millicent Alison Tylor, in whose presence I have spent night after coffee-fueled night writing this Proust-scale monument to limerance.' Well well, Stephan..."

"That-that wasn't supposed to be there! And in any case," he said, with a definitive tone of voice, as if this were the last word, "I was going to edit it to be more subtle."

Millie stared at him for a few seconds, and finally broke down in tears.

"I can't, Stephan."

"Millie..."

"I CAN'T, STEPHAN! I'M NOT INTERESTED, NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU WRITE!" With that she stormed out of the Waffle House and got a ride with a trucker going west. Stephan stood outside in the drizzly gale the rest of the night.

“Stephan-” Carl began when he exited the House at six that morning; Stephan was soaked, staring off into the endless distance as he had for hours.

“We're going. Hurry up, please.”

Still there was no reply from the man, his overcoat flapping in the breeze.

“It's time, Stephan. Come on.”

Stephan silently followed Carl into the van and they drove solemnly out of the parking lot into the distance.

At 7 that night, when they got back to the House, they were greeted by Rhys, with the news that, having thought better of the matter, Millie had asked to get out of the truck and walk back to the Waffle House; a few hours in she was hit by a pickup on the interstate and that was the end of that. In some ways, as much as he was horrified, Stephan was glad she was gone; it was over.

Stephan paced around the restaurant for a few minutes, ran his fingers through his hair, and finally put a song on the jukebox. Walking over to where he'd put his manuscript and typewriter, he tore up the dedication page and started to type anew. And as the creaky, lamenting voice of Bob Dylan began to wail in the sterile, fluorescent light about a former lifetime of toil and blood, Stephan typed, every now and again pausing to move his hands to the cold, inviting Gatorade bottle of Night Train Express.

"I dedicate this book to Millicent Alison Tylor, in whose memory I have spent night after coffee-fueled night...”

[vampireshark]

More stuff.

[Jipí]

You should write sigantures with a pen on paper and scan that. Looks more realistic.

[Miiil]

I haven't been on here in ages, but I've decided to attempt to become a regular again.

Anyway, creativity. I got bored over the past few days and put my notation software to use.

[vampireshark]

A very rough sketch of a coin. A lack on my end of Photoshop or a graphics suite that costs money isn't conducive to metallic-like effects, so a mock-up of the design is provided instead.

TLF 1 A Front.png (22.36 KiB) Viewed 5095 times

TLF Coin Reverse A.png (17.58 KiB) Viewed 5095 times

[Jetboy]

A (doubtless horrible) Spanish poem I wrote for my teacher's birthday Wednesday; he's Mexican, and the use of "chicharrones" is something of a running gag whenever I compose sentences.

Estés muy felíz, no estés muy triste
un otro año tu sobreviviste.
Haya pastel, y haya canciones,
y, más importante, haya chicharrones.
Siento que el poema no sea mejor
No tengo un otro, tómalo, por favor.

Or, for those who don't speak Spanish:

Let yourself be quite happy, and do not be sad
you have survived another year.
Let there be cake, and let there be singing
And, more importantly, let there be fried pork rinds.
I'm sorry that the poem isn't better
I don't have another, take this one, please.

[Torco]

it's okay... you'd generally say "que haya chicharrones", instead of "haya chicharrones", but what the hell.

[Viktor77]

I've completed my review of the 50 state license plates plus DC. I used the current general passenger plates which are most often seen on the road ie. I did not include newer 2011 plates issued to new registrations. These are the plates I used.

The following are loosely ranked in order of best to worst in each category.

Best plates:
New York – Represents both parts of state well, nice combination of colors, easy to read, pleasing to the eye
Vermont – Unique color, easy to read, simple yet effective
Idaho – Good colors, eye-catching but not distracting, balanced, symbolic, easy to read
Ohio – Easy to read, pleasing to look at, eye-catching, good separation of color, light background detail not distracting, info about state well placed
Pennsylvania – Easy to read, eye-catching but not distracting, one of very few states to use gold in a way which is not off putting

Other good plates:
Illinois
Minnesota
North Carolina
Maine
Louisiana
Oregon
Florida
Connecticut
Massachusetts
Colorado
West Virginia

Decent plates:
Washington
New Hampshire
Tennessee
Iowa
New Jersey
Georgia
South Carolina
Alaska
Texas
Kansas
Nebraska
Kentucky
Rhode Island
Nevada
Mississippi

Terrible plates:
Indiana – Good colors but off balance
Maryland – Not a terrible plate but the colors are strange and the logo is busy and too small
Wyoming – A nice design, too detailed, off balance
South Dakota – Decent colors but cursive South Dakota is hard to read and font is strange
Arizona – A nice design but off balance with hideous colors
Alabama – Far too busy color-wise
Utah – Ugly font, bad colors, too busy
Oklahoma – Far too busy, trying too hard.
North Dakota – Bad colors, small illustrations, highlight around state name and font color are not appealing
Montana – Montana name is hard to read, off balance, lower mountains are randomly placed and busy, state outline is nice though
New Mexico – Ugly illustration, off balance, lacks upper text to balance
Washington DC – Off balance, busy, capitalization is unnecessary
Delaware – Boring, out of place, looks antiquated
California – Boring, lacks illustration
Michigan – Boring, lacks illustration
Wisconsin – Boring with badly placed and small illustrations
Virginia – Boring, lacks illustration, off balance on bottom, font too small.
Missouri – Little bird is too small, colors are good, position of sticker is strange in middle of state outline
Arkansas – Bad design, illustration of diamond tells me nothing noteworthy about the state and is also crammed, bad colors
Hawaii – The rainbow is flat out hideous against the blank white background

[Jipí]

All we get is


(Image from Wikipedia)

Where the only indication of state is the coat of arms on the lower badge (here: Baden-Württemberg) after the county code at the beginning (here: RA for Rastatt), with the caption around the badge stating the name of the state and the issuing county authority (here: Landratsamt Rastatt).

[vampireshark]

Most European license plates otherwise look the same, but I am rather fond of the German, Swiss, and Austrian additions of the Land or canton indicators. Example:

Austrian plate from the state of Carinthia.



Oh, and I was bored. Again.

[Jipí]

You actually dared what EU commisioners didn't and named your money Franco, like the general In fact, I wouldn't have minded European Franc or Pound, but Euro is so boring and all too obvious (in Europe they pay with Euros durrr, and in America with Americans ...). On the other hand, I guess they probably wanted something neutral to make a clean cut, just like the Euro notes don't have any state insignia or national icons on them (though the coins have?!). Otherwise you might've got animosities against Francs (France, Belgium[, Switzerland]), Pounds (GB, Ireland, Italy, Spain), Marks (Germany, Finland), etc.; and Crowns (Scandinavia) would've been a total no-go.

[vampireshark]

You actually dared what EU commisioners didn't and named your money Franco, like the general :P In fact, I wouldn't have minded European Franc or Pound, but Euro is so boring and all too obvious (in Europe they pay with Euros durrr, and in America with Americans ...). On the other hand, I guess they probably wanted something neutral to make a clean cut, just like the Euro notes don't have any state insignia or national icons on them (though the coins have?!). Otherwise you might've got animosities against Francs (France, Belgium[, Switzerland]), Pounds (GB, Ireland, Italy, Spain), Marks (Germany, Finland), etc.; and Crowns (Scandinavia) would've been a total no-go.

Hey, I guess I must have an affinity for dictator references and whatnot. (I've had my surname compared to that of a certain East German leader multiple times, even by my boss at work.)

And Franc would've been a much cooler name instead of the Euro. Hell, even choosing the "Thaler" to reference the old monetary union of the Holy Roman Empire and the legendary Maria Theresa Thaler would've been pretty sweet. But that would've likewise caused some animosity, as Thaler's a German name.
But, even in their spirit of "neutrality", seriously, the bridges and whatnot on the banknotes aren't wholly neutral: the Rialto, the Pont de Gard, and others...
I like the Euro coins, as they're much more individualized, but give me Swiss Franc-like notes any day of the week over the current Euro notes.

[Jipí]

But, even in their spirit of "neutrality", seriously, the bridges and whatnot on the banknotes aren't wholly neutral: the Rialto, the Pont de Gard, and others...

Actually I'm told they were made up and just drawn according to the styles of different epochs.

[Timmytiptoe]

They are real now: A Dutch city has built (small) bridges imitating them.

[Jipí]

Woah, I almost understand what people say in the video if I concentrate real hard :O Like, if you mentally replace all the [χ] with [ɡ] it gets much clearer all of a sudden I've read about the posthumous construction of those bridges in German already, though.

[Jetboy]

Wait, Victor, how is DC's plate bad? I've always loved the fact that the city government gets to put "Taxation without Representation" on the cars in it.

Anyway, a friend asked me if I'd make him a sitemap picture in the style of an old medieval map, and I figured I'd give Gimp a try. So far, I have quite a bit; Gimp is pretty neat, I'd say. Can anyone find any errors in my sleep-deluded Latin?

[vampireshark]

Nine days and nothing new? Maybe this'll fix that...



And, unfortunately, my Latin knowledge is practically nonexistent, Jetboy, so no help. Sorry.

[joey]

Made this Dream Theater-y type prog metal song type thing using Garageband (without the help of a midi keyboard or some such fanciness):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXb4MYKlK-o