The images are all still MIA, and will have to wait for a while, but everything else should be restored and improved.
Thanks to kellan for wrestling with the maimed directory structure and doing a new install of mediawiki and database import!
Now I want to build wood machines.
Picked up the 4th sharing knife book today. It wasn't yet on the shelf, someone had to go pick it up of the carts in Recieving.
Damn but it's so like the magic I plan for Sedes. This is definitely a science fiction setting that looks like fantasy, which is my favorite. Also briefly winking at us in this book is a genetic problem I found in my elves.
Thinking about my first principles of sociobiology again. They present an interesting problem for bird societies. Working through form first principles, the major step from a standard bird social structure toward a full society is... oh, hey, raven society. But I'm not sure yet how to motivate the next step after that.
...
headasplode.
ETA: oh yeah, and there's a major Warcraft event going on right now.
I really like the line: "Strunk and White's brainless little pamphlet of 19th-century grammar nonsense".
Not that that offered any new insight.
There was also a graphviz-produced* directed graph of Stereotypical Incomprehensibility. That is, an arrow on this graph from, say, English to Greek represents a stereotype in English of Greek incomprehensibility (as in, "It's all Greek to me").
*I was just working with graphviz earlier today. I was visualizing the taxonomy of sitting positions.
( what this graph doesn't say )
Even more exciting was Don Ringe's guest post on "The Linguistic Diversity of Aboriginal Europe". Complete with general principles of diversity density, and fascinating claims like "perhaps sixty languages in Europe altogether, representing some forty families and thirty stocks." (Where Indo-European is a single stock.) That's a lot of diversity, most of which is completely lost to history.
His four follow-ups were interesting, too. They dealt much more with specifics of Indo-European, because that's what people ask about, and that's where the hard data is. So they were less interesting in the novelty of the data, but still interesting in details.
( follow-up links )
I also really like this line from one of the follow-ups:
"As Warren Cowgill pointed out to me some thirty years ago, there are at least two good reasons why iron might be called ‘blood-metal’; the fact that it rusts is one of them."
It's a fun line because it leaves to the imagination what the second, unspoken reason is.
It becomes even more interesting because there's an obvious second reason to us, but it is not a good reason: that iron is the primary active ingredient in oxygen transport in our blood. This is not knowable in the pre-Industrial world, and the fact that hemoglobin turns red when oxidized, just as iron does, is a bizarre and total coincidence.
Also interesting because it reminds me of my story of Ewi and its associated cosmology, in which Iron is the metal closely associated with the cosmological force of Blood (not creative, but well-attested).
( fun story about that )
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
pne made a post that included the word Rotwelsch, as the name of a language. After a little bit of research on the language I had a sudden analysis of Rotwelsch as "Road-Welsh", i.e. a foreigner language spoken by Travellers.sarkat wondered if that had anything to do with rottweilers. I can find no etymology for Rottweil, but I did find that it had two 't's, so there's probably no connection to Rotwelsch.In the mean time, I learned the the ancestors of the rottweiler include Roman war dogs that accompanied the legions to Germany. This got me looking at war dogs.
( War Dogs )
Bonus: Voytek the Soldier Bear. No, really.
It's also really exciting because of how much of my other research i can hook up with it:
*Research on history of Mesoamerica and Teotihuacan control of obsidian (incorporated as Elven history)
*Research on early stone tool use (incorporated as Dire Wolf culture)
*Kurlansky's Salt
*California history as driven by the Gold Rush and the re-investment of the wealth it accumulated. Not directly talked about but paralleled by other mineral booms.
*some later chapters I haven't gotten to will hook up with Cadillac Desert
*Mattingly's Renaissance Diplomacy
*info surrounding Bujold's Spirit Ring, which is based heavily on De Re Metallica and the Saxon silver mines.
*a lot of my recent research on Coin Etymologies shows up
*the research i did a few months back following out the links from the Line of Succession to the British Throne into topics like the Electors, and the various royal houses of Europe. (to be incorporated into dwarven history and culture)
and from those last few, sending out tendrils throughout European history, which I've been running into variously, including through a lot of articles for work.
Piece by piece, history comes together.
ETA: The section on Earthquakes starts with a discussion of 1989 and downtown Santa Cruz.
While I'm at it, I'm revising, correcting, and expanding the chart. I'm trying to add in every tax on this list for one thing.
When I'm done, it should be the definitive resource of Sedes taxa. Though, some of these taxa could also use some descriptions, that would be a good addition to a definitive resource.
See, the list is largely Linnaen in taxonomy, but the chart is largely cladistic. Which means when I go to add taxa that are on the list, but not on the old chart, I have to have information which is not contained in either chart or list; namely the interrelationships when the list gives 3 or more sister taxa (because cladistics only acknowledges pairs of sister taxa).
In some cases, such as the Maniraptora superfamilies, I can look up that information, or at least enough related information for me to assign relationships for the Sedes analogues of these Earth taxa.
Then I tried to do that with the Hadrosauran taxa, starting with looking up the subfamily Agrostosaurinae that i have listed. Actually, I expected there probably wasn't a subfamily Agrostosaurinae but that I was generalizing something, so what I really looked up was "Agrostosaurus".
No luck. So I looked up "Agrosto". Turns out that's Greek for "grass". Ah! On Earth, Hadrosaurs were extinct ten million years before grass started showing up (or at least maybe, there's some new evidence suggesting an earlier origin). This is a group of Sedes dinosaurs which has no Earth analogue, because they live in an ecology which dinosaurs never encountered.
So some taxa I could look up, and some I could remember, given a clue or two. But then I got to "Mhleasaurinae" on my list.
Huh? I have no idea. Anyone have any idea what I might have been thinking when I named a group Mhleasaurus? Lia maybe?
My only clue is it's a Lambeosaurid (Lambeosaurine, in Earth terms). If I made up the word, there has to be a greek root i found somewhere (but I can't find it either on the internet, or in my botanical latin dictionary); if I didn't make it up, there should be a Mhleasaurus somewhere. The other possibility is it's a typo, but I haven't been able to track down any variant of the name, either.
Before going any further, I note that all fractions in d20 are always rounded down. Assume there's a FLOOR operation wrapped around all these formulas, or whatever the equivalent is in your mathematical notation of choice.
Base Attack Bonus is very simple. There are three progression rates:
*Good: =Level (used for Barbarians, Fighters, Paladins, and Rangers in D&D; Strong Heroes in Modern; and Soldier and Jedi Guardian in Star Wars)
*Medium: =Level*(3/4) (used for most classes, assume everything I don't list elsewhere)
*Poor: =Level/2 (used for Sorcerer and Wizard in D&D; Smart Hero and Charismatic Hero in d20 Modern; not used in Star wars)
No worries there.
( From here, it gets more complicated )
Did one scholomance run friday night as we were wrapping up game. Almost didn't finish it because we were wrapping up. Got 60g worth of auctionables. And the Beaststalker Cap! That's all 8 drops, 6 of them upgraded, getting close to upgrading the final two
Saturday: d20 Sedes Draconis
ostone came over Saturday and we solidified a class system for d20 Sedes Draconis, including system that effectively unifies hit point and skill point progression, as well as making a more realistic hit point system, for use in a low combat game (but, I think, not too realistic to play).Sunday: 69 for Cheso
Played with kellan on Sunday and got a level for Cheso! He's closing in on 70 now. Oh, also, climbed the cliff outside Orgrimmar and got above the city.
Monday: Año Nuevo
We went to see the Elephant Seals at Año Nuevo on Monday. Learned about Elephant Seals, took some pictures. But I have to admit, elephant seals have limited visual interest, and are very easy to take pictures of; I haven't uploaded those yet. The real accomplishment was two photos of a coyote trotting along the cliff grinning at us (be sure to click "All Sizes" to actually see the coyote).
2. Cannibal jokes aside, "bilect" is an incorrect coinage for a speech pattern distinctive to a set of two people. "bi-" is a latin element, and it's a greek coinage paradigm. But "dilect" is problematic for obvious reasons. I'm leaning toward "didymolect", or possibly "zygolect" (or "zeugolect", if you prefer). Or those could be interpreted, if you wanted to, as more specific terms for twin-speak and working-partners-speak, presumably calling for two more terms, for the hypernym and for couple-speak.
3. I'm confused as hell with my new webservice that i'm trying to use to inventory and sell my sudden massive collection of first edition paperback science fiction from the 50s through 70s. I think I'm calling it "Previously Owned Futures".
4. I have to replace sea-bird imagery in stories in Sedes Draconis with sea-pterosaur imagery. But I need a common name. So far, I'm using "gull wyvern", but I'm open to suggestions.
In birds, pair-bonding of one sort or another is common, because in many birds, parental care is extremely intense (in energy requirement out of total energy budget for that period of time). This is, of course, most extreme in albatross. Really, albatross have parental care which is comparably intense to humans (maybe even more intense). But a large part of the intensity comes from the very limited period of time it extends over. No bird takes more than a year to reach physical maturity (i don't think, unless maybe it's ostriches or something), and most take much, much less (this is, as I think i've said before, my new explanation for the size cap on flying birds).
Contrast this to elephants. Elephants have significantly less intense parental care, but enough that it is crucial to the fitness of the offspring. It also extends for 10 to 15 years. That's a lot of total investment. You don't want to get half way through that and then lose that investment, you don't even want that investment lost if it was invested by your sibling and she then died halfway through. So lengthy parental care, I think, is correlated with strong female social networks.
Humans, then, have both intense and extended parental care. The extended parental care we inherit from our near relatives, as we do the female social networks. The intensity of the parental care is a new trait developed somewhere since the split with our living relatives, as is the pair-bonding.
I think this works out in what I've done so far. The dolicocephaline lineage has ended up with even more intense parental care resulting in stronger pair-bonding than humans, but still have social networks, as length of parental care matches or exceeds human. The torvir have what is probably a less developed form of the transition of social to social+pairbonding, suggesting intense parental care added to extended parental care, but not as intense as in humans. I think that makes sense.
Dryads have extended parental care, but any intensity of care is not on the part of the biological parents. So they have social networks, but not mate pair-bonding. I'll have to figure out exactly how intense care for new subadult-infants is, and what the social respone to that intensity is.
It will also be interesting to figure out what stages a sociobiology goes though in going from intense care to intense+extended (that is, approaching the human situation from the other direction). Presumably this would occur in a sentient bird species, such as the kaeghok (my corvid species). That also requires figuring out how to apply extended parental care to a bird.
Also, seriously folks, I'd like some comments on my last post. You don't have to critique the behavioral ecology if that's not your thing. But does i sound interesting? What stories does it bring to your mind? What opinions do you have on any of the points I'm less sure of? I'd really like comments from ostone, animate mush, banjomensch, glenn and kellan, especially. (But not exclusively!)
eta: banjomensch reports that he hasn't commented because he has not yet made it all the way through. that makes sense, I suppose :p
( Long )
Seeking comments, thoughts, opinions, questions, inspirations, epic poetry, etc.
*Many predators will engage in surplus killing in circumstance in which killing the prey becomes very easy: in one documented case, spotted hyenas killed 82 thompson's gazelles and seriously injured 27 more over a 4 square mile area. They ate only the best parts of only some of the gazelle. This happened on a moonless and stormy night, and tracks show that hyenas just walked up to each gazelle at a normal walking pace and killed them without much struggle. Presumably the gazelles were uniquely vulnernable at that time to the hyenas "which had not hestitated to kill far mroe than they could eat".
*"In addition,... what might appear to be wasteful killing may not be. Much of the carcass of a large animal is inedible; consuming too much protein can even be poisonous. People active in an outdoor life have high caloric requirements; often their prime need is fat. In times of drought and for much of the late winter and spring, bison, and presumably other Quaternary mammals, would have been in poor condition, with minimal body fat. Most of the carcass would have been unfit to eat, as Lewis and Clarke discovered." This also probably accounts for the cases of orcas killing grey whales and then eating the tongue and leave the rest of the body, too.
But I was thinking, since the sentients were constrained by largely artificial boundaries that did not constrain prey species, many species would already extend through and past the ranges of the hunters, and so there would be non-naive populations already throughout much of the Hajasith.
This is supported by some info i just got to in the Martin book: "Interestingly, many of the North American large mammals to survive human contact originated in or were closely related to species found in the Old World, where they overlapped with humans. Examples include caribou, elk, moose, and mountain sheep.... The extinction of large mammals of North America eliminated mostly long-established natives." So any species that overlapped with, say, the dwarven origin zone, would be non-naive throughout its range.
At least, non-naive with respect to dwarves. That's the other question to figure out. If a species has been exposed to upper paleolithic+ dwarves, is it non-naive with respect to other sentients? Probably any species familiar with any of the 5 hominid species would generalize its predation defenses to the other 4 (with the possible exception of some animals familiar with trolls may not be properly wary of the smaller hominids).
What about the non-hominid species, though? Is a species familiar with humans and normal wolves sufficiently well prepared to avoid local extinction as dire wolves move in? Probably. Is a species familiar with advanced hunting techniques in dire wolves prepared to deal with human or trollish hunting? Maybe not.
What about a species familiar with trolls, when the goblins move into the Yari? I'm not sure.
I think some more.
Then I grabbed my pterosaur book this morning that I've been wanting to consult since wednesday: "[Pterosaurs] were equipped with the unique property of being able to grow and fly"
Huh. Well, okay, yeah. That's obvious in retrospect. I mean, a Quetzacoatlus with a 40 foot wing span couldn't very well reach full size before it starts flying, could it? And, now that you mention it, I'm not so sure about it being unique. Fruit bats probably grow some after tey start flying. Maybe not much, though.
But in any case, birds find it impossible to grow and fly. Bats might get away with a little. Pterosaurs apparently did it extensively. Huh.
Oh, i'm checking this book to figure out the distribution of pterosaurs on the Hajasith. Preliminary results suggest all over the place.
But the pterosaurs on earth were declining in numbers from the mid Cretaceous onward. When small generalist pterosaurs went extinct, that turn over was filled not by new pterosaurs, as it had been before, but by new birds. The great pterosaurs extend right up to the K-T, but not the small ones really.
So that matches my long ago ideas about niche distribution between the fliers for on Sedes. Bats take the niches for the short, broad wings; pterosaurs take the niches for the long, narrow wings; birds take niches for in between wings (and now, i think, the niches for specialized leg and beaks)
Or to put it another way, birds are strongly constrained by body size (at least as fliers), and bats seem to be to also, to some degree or another. Pterosaurs are largely free from this constraint, so will take over the large flier niches.
Left the house Friday, early afternoon, took the bus to downtown, then to San Jose. Got picked up, over to sarah's house. Then a bit later over to mike and shannon's. Game till, what was it 1-ish, 2-ish, not too late as game goes. Back to sarah's. Up early, early in the morning, around 11. Meepa came over. Three of us drove up to San Francisco to kellan's. Four of us walked out to lunch, etc., walked back, drove out to see Bujold at Booksmith. Drove back to kellan's, he packed up, drove back down to sarah's (necessary stop to re-unite meepa with her car). Discussion of Vorkosigan books moved into sarah's living room for a while and additioned sarah's mother. Eventually managed to stop talking long enough to get meepa back to her car, and the three of us to sarah's car, and drive back down to santa cruz. Up even before 11 sunday morning, out to the theater to see Ratatouille, for the beginning of birthday celebrations, then me and my mother dash off after the movie up to San Jose for the first ever face to face meeting of the Gang of Five (warcraft dungeon group), then back down to Santa Cruz for dinner and ice cream.
( Bus trip up )
Game:
I can't remember much about game, it not being my game, i mostly sat in a corner and took more Knight's Tale screencaps and filled in incomplete tables (of the Sêrela script) on sedesdraconis.com that matt complained about.
( San Francisco )
( Her Ladyship )
More discussion about the Vorkosigan books the whle drive down and into the living room. Literary theory and gender-coding (Miles is classically female-coded), sociobiology, feminist utopias and Ethan of Athos. You know, the standard stuff you talk about about military space opera.
Next morning off to Ratatouille. It was good.
( Gang of Five Meeting )
( Bens )
Back back to Santa Cruz, where I'd left Sarah. Birthday dinner and presents and ice cream.
Post script, extension of the back and forth. Sarah then of course had to drive backbackback to San Jose. About the time she got there she realized she'd left her computer here in Santa Cruz. She came backbackbackback monday afternoon to retrieve it.
wheh.
I put up a basic physial map for the Hajasith v2.0 (or 3.0, or possibly 4.0)
I haven't put any cities in other than the Tâl Katar, because I'm not content with my labelling system yet. I'm torn. I really want the grouping function from Illustrator, but I also really like the layer effects I've put together in photoshop. Hmm, i wonder if new, cs versions of photoshop have layer/object grouping?
ETA: Ho-ho! this version of photoshop has it! never found the layer set thingy before.
ETA2: hmmm, but apparently not nested grouping :-/ I want to be able to nest groupings, and apply blending effects groups.
ETA3: oh, but I remember the other problem with photoshop. My image isn't big enough for detail work, and scaling is problematic. Also, the map must remain one file, it is not acceptable for detail work to be in a different file. hmmm :-/
ETA4: hmm, apparently I made the images clean enough that scaling it up 20% worked fairly well. This might work.
In general, the species stats are fairly understated. I have given very few (read: one) modifier to any mental stat (Int/Wis/Cha), mostly only physical stat modifiers. For now, I'm uncomfortable giving mental stat modifiers, and especially penalties. Oh, and humans don't get bonus skills or feats. Everyone gets the 1st level bonus feat, and only gnomes and trolls get bonus skill points.
I've given a lot of racial ±2 on fortitude saves versus various environmental effects. I don't think these are to trivial to bother with, but I could be wrong.
I'm probably going have systems of background packages. These will determine native language and possible other languages (there will be no Int based bonus languages) as well as some miscellaneous bonuses and penalties.
Also determined based on the background package, each character will have a set of "species familiarities". These represent familiarity with the species' facial expressions, posture, basic anatomy and similar things. When working with an unfamiliar species, a character receives a penalty (i'm think -8 or there about) to skill checks like Sense Motive, Diplomacy, and Treat Injury (any others?). I don't yet know how characters will be able to add additional species familiarities during game play (skills points? dm rulings? something else?)
( oh, that was kinda long wasn't it. sorry for the originally uncut post )
Where d&d suggests class-specific character sheets, I will probably make species-specific character sheets, to cover such things as marking starting skills for trolls and the like. Also, because I intend to design the classes to encourage multi-classing, like d20 modern, or perhaps even more so.
Reactions?
I start to put it together. I've got several of few of the words done when I realize that I'm grouping the objects wrong in Illustrator. I've been grouping them by word, subgrouped by glyph type: a group for the stem of the word, a group for the vowels of the word, etc. I need to be subgrouping them as syllables, each subgroup containing the stem, vowel, coda, and tone for one syllable. This is not only theoretically better, since I'm working with a featural syllabary here, it will also save much effort when I go to change the morphological endings, such as converting names to genitives (which are used in other peoples' names).
So I re-group all my words I've done for a bit, then start building more names. I'm getting towards the end when I realize, I've made my vowel glyphs too small from the start. So I go back to my glyph file, make the vowels bigger. Methodically go through the file i'm working on and delete all the vowels and replace them with newer, bigger ones, and re-position them.
The I go back to putting together the couple names. Finally I finish that file around 01:30:
(hmm, that looks kind of washed out to me. not the rich black it is in illustrator. i should poke it sometime, see if i can get a richer black.)
I haven't started working on anything today, cause I needed to prepare a demo for ASL class, now done; and then go to class. And it's too hard to stop working.