Caveat: Yet Another Map Server

I took the first steps over this past weekend and today to publish a new map server website. Here is a screenshot of its current status in my browser.
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This is, maybe, the fourth map server I’ve built from scratch using the OSM (openstreetmap.org) architecture, which is open source.
Partly, I do this because I keep wanting to practice and get better at putting them together. There is quite a bit of code customization required to get the server working on a “non-earth” map. So it’s good to keep in practice.
But also, if this one works adequately, I intend to migrate my Arhet map server (which has 20 or so active users, a few of whom have given me a small amount of money) to a newly built map server, fully segregated from all my various blogs and such. All this time, Arhet as existed at the timorously-named test.geofictician.net, and shared server space with multiple other applications, including this here blog thingy, a wiki, a MUD, and sundry web-doohickeys.
So first, I’m doing this practice run, using another planet, Rahet. The similarity between the names “Arhet” and “Rahet” is not coincidental: they are both anagrams of “Earth”. I intend for all my map servers to have such names.
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Caveat: The Terrible mysql Crash of 2021

I still don’t know how it happened. I somewhat suspect I got hacked, somehow … I found strange and unexpected Chinese IP addresses in my mysql error log. But I don’t understand mysql back end or admin well enough to know for sure what was going on.
I was able to restore a full-server backup to a new server instance, and have re-enabled the mysql-driven websites (my 2 blogs, my wiki, etc.) on the new instance. Meanwhile, I somewhat stupidly reactivated the non-mysql website (the geofictician OSM-style mapping site, the so-called “rails port”) on the old server instance. The consequence of that is that I am now stuck with a two-server configuration where I had a single server configuration before. I think in the long run I’ll want to isolate ALL my mysql-based sites to a single server, and ALL my non-mysql-based sites to another single server. That’s going to take a lot of shuffling things around, which is not trivial.
For now this blog (and my other blog) seems healthy and up-and-running, again.
There may be more downtime ahead as I try to reconfigure things more logically, however.
[This entry cross-posted from my other blog.]
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Caveat: Server down and downer…

My server crashed sometime early this morning.
I don’t know why. Specifically, some kind of fatal database error, on the mysql database used to back up all the blogs (like this one) and several other important applications.
I have successfully restored the blog – I’ve relocated it, using a backup file, to another server.
But all the other things running on the server: my mapping application (OSM-style GIS for geofiction), my other blog, my MUD, some development work – all those other things are still missing in action.
I have a lot of work ahead of me, trying to rebuild this stuff.
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Caveat: Binge-scrolling Space Boy

I have been quite negligent in posting to this here blog thingy, except for the daily trees and poems.
You might wonder, well, what in the world does he do all the time, these days?
There’s my work at the gift shop – but it’s hardly full time. And there are my various projects: outdoor projects, like the storage tent and treehouse, and indoor projects like my mapping server, my geofiction, my aimless feints at unfinishable novels.
And meanwhile, I kill time reading things. Blogs, mostly – about politics or science or culture or philosophy. Lately, I have plunged into reading a few “webtoons.” This may require explanation for those not in-the-know with respect to current cultural trends. A webtoon is the online incarnation of the good-ol’ graphic novel, also called “manga” – a Japanese loanword but fully nativized to English at this point. Once upon a time, these were also called comic books, but the comic books of my youth or my parents’ youth have little in common with contemporary graphic novels, which often treat complex themes, have novelistic plots and characterizations, and can be of epic length.
I had a phase, about 10 years ago, when I was reading manga quite a bit. I picked up the habit from my middle-school students in Korea. It was something they did, and so I pursued it too, out of curiosity and to find points of common interest. There were some excellent old manga that I enjoyed – the Deathnote series, the Excel Saga, I even found a graphic novel version of the life of the Buddha that I read substantial portions of.picture (At right, a photo of my manga collection, on the shelf – you can see I even bought a Korean edition of Deathnote, thinking to try to learn Korean better while reading it.)
With the emergence of smartphones and the always-online generation of my last few cohorts of students in Korea, I noted that interest in manga (called by the cognate “manhwa” in Korean) had faded, and had been replaced by what have come to be called webtoons (In Korean 웹툰 [wep-tun]). These are graphic novels translated to the infinitely scrollable vertical format familiar to web browsers.
And since coming back to the US, I have occasionally dipped into the world of webtoons out of a kind of nostalgia for my years of daily interactions with Korean teenagers, most of whom always had a webtoon window open on their smartphone, which they would scroll through and read given any free time to do so whatsoever.
One webtoon I was enjoying was a sci-fi series called “Seed,” by a Turkish artist, I believe. It deals with themes of emergent Artificial Intelligence, the nature of cognition, and of course, lots of international spy-thriller events, too. More recently, I was browsing through a series called “No Longer a Heroine!” – a Korean series that I enjoy mostly because it’s a low-bandwidth way to remain somewhat immersed in Korean culture – the plot is reminiscent of any number of Korean television dramas of the most generic sort, but vaguely compelling nevertheless.
pictureBut then I found “Space Boy.” This webtoon started in early 2015, but this month is the first I’d known anything about it – though it’s been quite popular. It’s currently on episode 263. Each episode is like a chapter in the old manga books, and, given the format is heavy on artwork and often quite light on written dialogue, can be consumed in a matter of 5 or so minutes. But at 263 episodes, that’s a lot of scrolling. I did something I’ve never done before with a webtoon – I compulsively read through all the episodes, catching up to the most recent online. It took me about 5 days – a few hours each day, easily.
It’s a remarkable bit of narrative work. The art, too, is nicely done – but most webtoons I’ve seen are compellingly drawn, from an artistic angle, exploring visual space in interesting ways, providing support to narratives through creative bits of visual evidence and cues. This has all that, but the story itself is several grades above your “average” webtoon – at least in my estimation (and limited experience). At times, it reads like some kind of CS Lewis allegory about love, forgiveness, trauma, human frailty, and such. Other times it’s just a simple teen romance, and other times, it’s a sci-fi thriller.
I’m not sure that I have anything conclusive to say. The series is on-going and unfinished. But if anyone wants to try a long-running webtoon, they could do much worse than “Space Boy” as an introduction to the genre.
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Caveat: Round and round

[NOTE: the following is cross-posted from my other blog – just putting it here to show what my “other online persona” looks like.]
I ran across a small, free website that someone made that transforms a flat map of an imaginary planet into a globe that you can rotate with the mouse or that can be used to generate a “spinning world” gif. It’s called maptoglobe.com.
I decided I wanted to make one for my planet, Arhet – just out of curiosity. This did have a few minor technical challenges. First, I had to “knit” together the tile images for Arhet. I found a nice utility that does this, an application called tile-stitch by Eric Fischer. It can be found on github. Except for one small problem, I just followed the documentation provided on the github README. That one problem: to get it to work in my machine, I needed to modify the code in the stitch.c file to include the full path to the geotiff utilities. So…
Original code:...
#include <geotiffio.h>
#include <xtiffio.h>
...

My version:...
#include </usr/include/geotiff/geotiffio.h>
#include </usr/include/geotiff/xtiffio.h>
...

Once that was set up, I simply extracted the tiles at zoom level 5 from the Arhet2-carto render using the tile-stitch utility, with this command
./stitch -o arhet5.png -- -85.05 -179.99 85.05 179.99 5 https://tiles01.rent-a-planet.com/arhet2-carto/{z}/{x}/{y}.png

That got the whole planet into a square .png file, which I called arhet5.png.
The next problem is that the maptoglobe website requires the map image to be in a equirectangular projection. But the tiles for Arhet are in the modified mercator projection used by almost all online “slippy maps,” classified as EPSG:3857.
So the arhet5.png file was in the wrong projection. I found out I could use another utility that I already had, the gdal library, to do this job. I ran the following commands.
/usr/bin/gdal_translate -of Gtiff -co "tfw=yes" -a_ullr -20037508.3427892 20036051.9193368 20037508.3427892 -20036051.9193368 -a_srs "EPSG:3857" "arhet5.png" "arhet5_tfw.tiff"
/usr/bin/gdalwarp -s_srs EPSG:3857 -t_srs EPSG:4326 -ts 6400 3200 "arhet5_tfw.tiff" "arhet5.tif"

These produced a .tif file in the right projection, 6400 x 3200 pixels. I then opened this file and resaved as .png again (because this is a more compact format that is therefore uploadable to maptoglobe.com – which has a maximum file size limit).
I then uploaded that .png file to the maptoglobe site, and it allowed me to save the resulting “globe” – it’s accessible here. Further, I was able to make this nice little spinning planet gif:

That’s the planet Arhet, as it currently stands – note that most of the mapping there is not my own, but the work of the various other Arhet members who have joined me in my experiment.
That worked out so well that I did the same thing for my own private planet, Rahet (note that the names Arhet and Rahet are obviously related; Rahet came first, and when I decided to change the project and invite other participants, I renamed the old Rahet as Arhet, and then resurrected the old Rahet later and as a separate project again).
Here is a the link for Rahet on the maptoglobe site, and here is the spinning planet gif:

So those are pretty cool. Remember that the original “slippy maps” (HRATEs) of these two projects are on the map portion of this website, here and here.
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Caveat: On the Intolerance of Online Political Communities

I have read the “Lawyers, Guns, Money blog” (LGM) almost daily for 4 or 5 years now. I always found many of the comments interesting or enlightening, and collectively they offered a particular view on the world that I felt I need to remain exposed to. This morning, I saw a thread on the Slate Star Codex blog (SSC) controversy and I was happy and surprised – because SSC is not exactly on the same political wavelength as LGM, but I used to read that blog regularly too, for similar reasons.
So I de-lurked and made a comment, mostly to the effect that I was a “regular” lurker on both sites, and that I was pleased the one was acknowledging the other.
I also made a throw-away comment about how the NYT seems to be essentially vilified by both sides, and that seemed… well, indicative of something. I suppose it was that bit of anodyne “both siderism” that raised the hackles of the jackals. I might have done better not to have said that.
My comment was subjected to what seemed to be a fairly vitriolic set of reactions by some (though not all) commenters. Perhaps if I’d been more attentive to the LGM comments section in the past, I wouldn’t have been unprepared for this. But I was utterly unprepared. And hurt.
I am disappointed and frustrated. I am losing not one but two of my favorite websites in the space of a week. One because of Scott’s “take my toys and go home” reaction to the NYT. And the other because I was stupid enough to try to contribute to that community more actively and was attacked. I am the first to admit that I am thin-skinned. There’s a good reason why I mostly “lurk” in these online communities, of course.
It’s actually doubly frustrating, because in my own politics I think I’m much more sympathetic to the LGM position (proudly left) than to the SSC (right – at least it’s characterized that way by its detractors – I think the characterization merits some caveats). And I will admit that I was probably shaken in part because this experience does, in a sense, call out my “privilege.” How can I argue?
Yet I don’t think I have to present bona fides to the American left. At least half my positions are farther left than anyone in the progressive wing of the democratic party. 100% open borders? Please. Single-payer socialized medicine? Even “far right” South Korea manages that. De-militarization of the police, including take away all their guns? They’d learn de-escalation skills fast, I bet. Reparations for descendants of slaves and for Native Americans? Due yesterday. Close down Gitmo and all similar sites completely? I’m still waiting, Mr. Obama. Gender-based affirmative action for all government hires and contracts? Let’s do it. I proudly supported Elizabeth Warren’s candidacy this election cycle, and only grudgingly will move rightward to support Biden because… well, the alternative?
And yet when I had expressed my sympathies to the SSC diaspora via a comment at a known SSC-adjacent web community, I received no such vitriol. It’s almost as if the current American left is guilty of exactly the kind of vitriol and ideological intolerance that I had always taken to be merely caricatures drawn by those on the right.
The whole thing depressed me deeply.
I normally stay very quiet about my politics on this here blog. It’s a survival mechanism, part of keeping sane first as a long-term resident in xenophobic and quasi-fascist South Korea, and now as a resident in the libertarian “no government is good government” wilderness of Southeast Alaska… not to mention now being roommates with – and sometime caretaker to – my uncle, who very much fits in here, ideologically. But something has compelled me to lay the cards on the table, if just for a moment. I suppose being accused of wishy-washy both-siderism has provoked me. I’ll go back to my lurking, now.
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Caveat: The Blogosphere’s Etymology

A person who goes by Tanadrin posted a fanciful etymology for the word “blogosphere”:

Blogosphera is naturally 1st declension (the medieval form of blogosphaera, from the Greek βλωγοσφαῖρα), blagosphera is actually the neuter plural of the rarely-attested blagospherum, itself derived from the earlier blagospes, “to check a blog in the hopes it has updated in the last five minutes, even though it almost certainly has not.” Blagh is the Umbrian reflex of the Greek βλωγοσ, both ultimately from Indo-European *bʰleh₁-, “to blow, be vapid; to be wrong on the internet.” The oblique form of spes (sper-) was altered by analogy, and the meaning of the plural in question shifted from “checking your list of blogs repeatedly” to “the blogs being checked.” Yet blagosphera remained the subject of plural verbs until the Late Latin period, when it was treated as a singular first-declension noun by scribes with a poor knowledge of Latin.

Blagoblag is actually unrelated; it comes from Proto-Germanic *blakaz, from the Indo-European root *bʰleg-, “to shine”, referring to the glow of a computer screen. The word entered English via Old Norse, which retained the reduplicated form (lost in the West Germanic languages, but not the North or East) from verb class VII, *blagoblagana, “to shitpost.”

I find it entertaining.
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Caveat: Slate Star Supernova

I had a bit of a shock this morning. I went to collect my daily dose of internet, and found my favorite blog had folded up shop overnight.
The announced cause of this is that the host of the blog, who goes by the pseudonym Scott Alexander, was about to be doxxed by the New York Times in an article they’re writing about his blog. “Dox” is a recent coinage used in internet contexts meaning “to publish the facts of an individual’s identity who has expressed a wish to remain anonymous.”
The blog was called Slate Star Codex. I think the origin of the name was that it’s a “near-anagram” of Scott’s pseudonym. He’s good at that kind of wordplay. For those who’ve never heard of it until right now, it will be hard to explain what this blog was – since it’s now gone. It’s not just a blog – my blog is just a blog. But Scott’s blog was a community. And Scott is an excellent writer and thinker.
I came upon SSC in an an unusual way. I discovered SSC because of Scott’s imaginary maps. Given my geofiction hobby, I was of course curious. So one could say: I came for the maps, and stayed for the commentary.
I can link to others who wrote about the blog’s disappearance. Scott Aaronson wrote about it, here, for example. Tom Chivers wrote about it, here.
Aaronson compared Scott and his blog to Mark Twain. That seems hubristic (is there such a thing as being hubristic on behalf of another?), but the more I think about it, the more I like the comparison. Scott writes with humor and wit and looks at things from unexpected angles, and does so while hoving to a clearly enunciated humanistic optimism that is enviable. His vast community of blog commenters slanted, on average, substantially to the right of Scott’s declared values, yet he and they were always civil to one another, because that was what Scott, the community moderator, expected and enforced.
I don’t need to go into a long description of the Slate Star Codex community – others have done that better than I have, including those two bloggers linked above. I will note that I was never a participant in the community, but rather simply an observer. I have what many would consider a strange approach to politics: I have fairly strongly held convictions, but mostly I don’t enjoy explaining or defending those positions. I do enjoy reading other people doing that, though. Hence my enjoyment of Slate Star Codex and its community of commenters.
I felt the same way about Andrew Sullivan’s blog back about a decade ago. It had evolved into a civil community of political commentators. And that despite the inherent disadvantage that Andrew Sullivan himself was a pretty obvious asshole. Scott Alexander is not an asshole. Sometimes functional online communities just happen, I think. The Andrew Sullivan moment is long past, and he’s gone to seed (in my opinion) and is almost unbearable to read and the community is dispersed. I hope Scott Alexander’s fate isn’t that one. He would be be horrified, I think, at the comparison.
I’ll miss Slate Star Codex, if it never comes back.
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Caveat: Link-rot

I have been working on a project, lately, involving the back-end of this here blog. It keeps me occupied while I wait for the galley proof for my upcoming book publication, and while I wait for my radishes to grow.
Over time, there is a thing called “link-rot” – links to websites become stale due to changes on whatever site is being linked to. Sometimes videos disappear, sometimes new articles get re-named by their hosts, etc.
So part of keeping a long-term blog functional is going back and fixing those rotted links – either replacing them, or simple putting a note, “link no longer works.”
My blog has accumulated a fair number of rotten links over its 15 years and 7500 entries.
But by far the worst offender is the vast number of broken “internal” links – links from one blog entry to another, including to my many pictures. The reason I have this problem is because I had to abandon my previous blog-host two years ago and move to a self-hosted version of this blog. I’m happy with that decision, but it means that 1000’s (yes 1000’s!) of internal blog links from before 2018 do not currently work. Perhaps if you’ve visited older entries, you’ve noticed this.
Anyway, I’m trying to fix all this link-rot – both the external and internal variety. It’s very tedious work – there is no magic “find-replace” that can do it, because the format differences between the old links and the new links are arbitrary.
Ah well. It keeps me socially isolated. Which is, apparently, a goodly thing, these days.
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Caveat: https://

Probably most of you won’t even notice, but as of about 3 pm this afternoon, Alaska Daylight Time, this here blog moved from “http” to “https”. This is a substantial accomplishment, that has taken me two years to get around to doing. I had things running well, and so was afraid to mess with it – as they say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”
But I finally bit the bullet, in the wake of my frustrating experience with my other server over the last few days. In essence, the work on that server functioned as a “practice run” for what I needed to do.
Why make this change? Well, “http” is being phased out in favor of “https”, all over the online world. The latter is “more secure” by some standard I actually don’t really understand, but it’s become the norm for well run and “safe” websites, so as long as caveatdumptruck.com remained on “http”, it was in danger of ultimately being ostracized from the respectable part of the internet. When I left my prior blog host in 2018, it was because they were forcing me to move to “https”, but at that time I wasn’t ready. So now I finally got ready, and did it. It’s not that I disagreed with their wanting me to move, I disagreed with their having taken the decision for me, without consultation.
If done correctly, the migration should have zero impact on the user experience. The one casualty was the free little “flag counter” I’d managed to find – I’ll have to find another that’s “https” compatible.
Happy web surfing.
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Caveat: 8 hours of sysadmin annoyance

I had a bit of an annoying two days. Yesterday, I was pursuing my hobby of building websites, by trying to build out a prototype of a website for a friend. An early step in this process is creating a subdomain on one of my domains (e.g. caveatdumptruck.com is this blog’s domain, and something like “blog.caveatdumptruck.com” would be a subdomain). This should be an easy step, but it’s crucial because you don’t want to mix a new website up with any existing websites on a given domain.
Instead, somehow the versions of some of the software running my web server got “out of sync” – that’s my best guess as to what happened. There’s a lot of software on the “back end” of a website: apache (the “web server”), php (the thing that makes webpages “interactive”), wordpress (the blog publishing tool that can also be used to build not-so-bloggy websites of various sorts), certbot (the free certificate registrar that makes websites “secure” so your browser doesn’t give you alarming notices about bad guys), etc. All of these have to talk to each other. And if they have different versions, they might stop understanding each other.
So something was bad. And my whole server ended up down and all websites on it inaccessible. I spent 8 hours today uninstalling and reinstalling various bits and pieces, trying to get everything in sync again. It was really above my competency. So frustrating, because when I finally got it working, I’m not even sure how I did it.
So a 15 minute task took two days, with 8 hours this morning desperately trying to get my server up and running – this is not the main server, so my blog and map server weren’t down, but my pictures are hosted on this secondary server, as well as several sites I’m running for friends.
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Caveat: Give that homework app a one-star review

Schools in Wuhan, China, have been closed due to the epidemic. According to an article at LRB, kids were being forced to use a “homework app” on their phones to complete schoolwork. They figured out that if they gave the app a one-star review, it would get removed from the app store on their phones, and they’d have an excuse not to complete homework.

Children were presumably glad to be off school – until, that is, an app called DingTalk was introduced. Students are meant to sign in and join their class for online lessons; teachers use the app to set homework. Somehow the little brats worked out that if enough users gave the app a one-star review it would get booted off the App Store. Tens of thousands of reviews flooded in, and DingTalk’s rating plummeted overnight from 4.9 to 1.4.

See? There’s always a solution to these problems.
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Caveat: documentation of my geofictions

Some of you might recall, I have another blog, besides this one. I maintain that blog mostly because this here blog is tied to my real-world identity, but I prefer to remain a little bit anonymous (obfuscated and pseudonymous more than truly anonymous) on the geofiction websites where I work and interact on what is really one of my main hobbies. I don’t post there very often – nothing close to daily, as I do here. A few times a month, on average. So this morning, I ended up writing a quite long entry on that other blog. It also has a number of included images, etc., so rather than reproduce it here (which would be complicated because my two blog platforms are truly independent, and I’ve got them configured quite differently), I’ll just give you a link:

Documentation of my geofictions, at blog.geofictician.net. Consider this to be my blog-post of the day, but off over on that other blog.

[UPDATE: On reconsideration, I’ll directly cross-post (cut-paste) that entry here following, for posterity’s sake.]

I was inspired by a recent bit of “OOC documentation” by the OGF user donnamaw (here) to discuss, if only in outline form, the real-life origin stories of my various geofictions. How and when did I invent, in my imagination, the various places that I have drawn (or attempted to draw) maps of? The order in which these places were drawn or introduced to geofictional spaces is not the order in which my mind created them. Here I’ll try to present them in the order in which they were first imagined.

Rahet.

Rahet is a planet. It has four main continents, which bear a reliable suffix meaning “continent,” -eye (pronounced as IPA /eje/). The history of Rahet is one of human colonists settling a desert planet and terraforming it over 1000’s of years. The terraforming process is frequently interrupted by squabbles among the factions that emerge, but nothing is stable, and few nations and groupings last more than a few generations. The technological level is high but unequally distributed – you have spaceships and artificial intelligent machines coexisting with spears and chariots. There is a particular faction, led by a machine named “Zon,” which keeps the terraforming project more-or-less “on track,” but often at the cost of moral clarity. All of this was developed in my imagination beginning around the age of 10. I was a bit precocious as a child, and by 10 I had read the Lord of the Rings, the Dune books by Frank Herbert, and numerous other pulp sci-fi works by authors such as Andre Norton, Alan Dean Foster, and Harry Harrison, among others. These types of works influenced my thinking about Rahet, and by age 12 or so I had a quite clear picture of the planet’s historical trajectory and some of the key elements of the culture. I began drawing maps early. Most were focused on the continent called Tsiqeye, which is where the earliest settlements were established, around a rock formation called Redithk Illim (which resembled in my imagination Wyoming’s Devil’s Tower, but much larger). I remember drawing out an outline of the continent with coastlines and major rivers at around age 11, taking it down to the photocopy store (such as life before scanners and cheap, high quality printers), and making a hundred “blanks.” I numbered them at 50 year intervals (thus covering 5000 years of history), and then drawing a series of historical maps for the nation-states, tribes, empires and other factions playing out Rahet’s complicated and intricate history. I wish I still had those maps. A few years ago I uploaded Rahet to my new geofictician server, but later deleted it, deciding I wasn’t ready to dedicate an entire server to the project. Here is a (sadly blurry) screenshot from that time when it was uploaded.

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Rahet has remained a constant in my imagination ever since my pre-adolescent years. Note that the name is an anagram of “Earth.” Here is a map I found just recently, of the Rahet continent called Preye. I believe I was in high school when I drew this (early 1980s).

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Ta Hre.

Ta Hre is another planet that was created around the same time as Rahet. It exists in the same universe, but rather than being an earth-like, terraformed planet it’s an airless moon, with people living in pressurized “cities” laid down in craters and canyons in the moon’s surface. I never really attempted to draw maps of the planet as whole, but I did draw many of these enclosed cities – often not just standard airplane-view maps, but also elevation diagrams of the various levels of the cities, since they were fully three-dimensional. Ta Hre is another anagram of “Earth,” of course.

Mahhal.

Mahhal is a few years younger than Rahet. I created it in high school. In fact, it started as two separate planets/cultures that I merged into one when I was in college. The first, which gave the name of the planet, Mahhal, was created as a kind of “antagonist” to Rahet. I had started trying to write a novel about Rahet, and I needed some “bad guys” so the novel would have a strong life-or-death conflict. I created the Mahhalians as an alien group who arrived at Rahet at some point and attempted to conquer it. They mostly failed, but they maintain outposts and fight occasional skirmishes with the Zon faction which works to protect Rahet’s independence. Over time, I created the Mahhalians’ background, including a conlang and ideas about their culture and planet. They are a kind of dystopian theocracy, but very high tech. They are humanoid (and in my never-completed novel, I leave as a kind of open mystery whether the Mahhalians are mutant humans or an unrelated species). They live on a world that is currently in an “ice age,” thus there are permanent ice caps on both poles and extending to about 40° latitude. Only the equatorial zones are habitable, but the Mahhalians have built vast, high-density cities, often protected by strings of giant domes across the landscape. The other geofiction, created at the same time, I called Pas Daons. It wasn’t a whole planet, but a country. In particular, I created the cities called Derindonderak and Askendom. In its first iteration, Pas Daons wasn’t a high tech or alien society. It was just a kind of alternate Earth, such as would fit in well on OGF today. I drew a detailed “city atlas” on paper of the city Derindonderak, and I still have clear visuals of the city’s layout, its topography, street plan, etc. However, by my second year in college, I’d “borrowed” Pas Daons to give more detail to my Mahhalians, and thus Derindonderak became the commericial capital of Mahhal, and I came to see Pas Daons as a “historical snapshot” of the more advanced Mahhalians. Rahet/Mahhal and the novel that was set there were abandoned when I moved to Mexico, and lay dormant until I attempted to resurrect Mahhal as an OGF archipelago in 2015. I had to make a lot of compromises with respect to my original vision for the Mahhalians – they had to be demoted from high tech, planet-controlling aliens to mediocre humans confined to a high-latitude archipelago. They retained their dystopian theocracy and conlang, however. At this point, I consider my effort to port Mahhal into OGF to be an abject failure. I became dissatisfied with the compromises I felt I’d been forced to make, and my hope to recreate the seething metropolis of Derindonderak (so vivid in my imagination) was disappointing. I retain a “rump state” version of Mahhal in OGF mostly to justify the existence of Tárrases (q.v. below) – and because I just like the name. It’s my oldest and most closely cherished imaginary name. Here is Mahhal as currently drawn on OGF (and link to boundary relation):

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Rasf-sayan.

Rasf-sayan is another geofiction I developed in high school. In its first incarnation, it was a parallel-earth Caribbean island with a conlang meant to resemble a native American language. I modeled it socially and culturally on Haiti. I didn’t start a novel about Rasf-sayan, rather, I started an epic poem about a character named Aochra. He is fighting corruption and trying to save hopeless lives mired in poverty. He’s kind of a cross between “Blade” and Bob Marley. I drew lots of detailed paper maps of Rasf-sayan in high school, mostly focused on the main city, Poer-rasf-oa. At some point in college, I hijacked Rasf-sayan for my Rahet project. The hijacking was thorough and I don’t regret it. Rasf-sayan became an island on Rahet, in the sea between the continents of Preye and Sekieye. Rasf-sayan is mired in poverty because it is one of the pockets of Rahet controlled by the ruthless and inhumane Mahhalians. They have one of their space elevators anchored on the island, that allows them easy access to and from the planet. In the Rahet novel, the main character is trying to reach Rasf-sayan, because he needs to get off-planet. That’s his McGuffin that drives the plot. He meets Aochra, as a supporting character, and who is double agent – nominally working for the Mahhalians, but secretly allied with the Zon. Ultimately, any geofiction I draw of Rasf-sayan will be located and integrated to Rahet. Here is Rasf-sayan on Arhet, as of right now.

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It’s barely started. But I retained it when I deleted the rest of Rahet and made it into Arhet (see what I did there?), because I thought I’d work on it at some point.

Ardisphere.

Ardisphere had a strange genesis. There is a novel by Vladimir Nabokov, entitled Ada. I believe there is a bit of geofiction (or at the least, alt-history) in that novel, since the Russians seem to control North America. An important setting in that novel is a place called Ardis Hall. I must acknowledge that that is the origin of the name Ardisphere. But… the imaginary country came after the name, by a few years. At first, I remember using the name Ardisphere for an early website I developed, as a kind of alternate identity where I would present my geofiction ideas or half-made novels. I made my first website in late 1994 (the web was only 2 years old at that time), on a thing called geocities – an early free website hosting service. I had a “professional” site that I used for my work at that time, and personal site, that was called Ardisphere. It was only a few years later, after I allowed the Ardisphere website to pass into internet history, that I started using the same name for an imaginary country. I had started a novel in which a group of refugees from earth, traveling in a sub-light-speed “generation ship,” arrive in another star-system with an earth-like planet, inhabited by a alien race that has a technological level similar to humanity’s. As refugees, the aliens decide to grant to the humans a few thousand square kilometers of mostly desert land they aren’t much using, to build their own refugee country. I drew a detailed map of Ardisphere. Since many of the refugees were from Latin America, most of the cities ended up with Spanish names. Hence Villa Constitución, Cerro y Casa, Puerto Desolado, El Cabo, Palmeras Grises. The names were such as I imagined a modern group of Spanish-speakers might apply to the alien planet they were colonizing while focusing on the ideals of their “new earth.” The novel was about a point in time about 100 years after the building of the settlement, at a point when aliens and humans have started to coexist in a hybrid culture. The novel, like all my novels, never reached any kind of finished state, but it included “Clarkean” magic (i.e. “any sufficiently high technology is indistinguishable from magic), criminal gangs from poor neighborhoods (the slums of VC), aliens engaging in conspiracies to control the humans they’ve welcomed to their planet, and humans doing the same in return, etc. The novel also has the seed of what later became the Cartographers and Cyclopedians – freemason-like secret societies that play a large role in the evolution of life in the country. Interestingly, in the original map of the Ardisphere, it was a peninsula. When I first stumbled across OGF in early 2014 and made an account, I took the only green country I saw at that time, AR025. That wasn’t a peninsula. But I’d already decided to make Ardisphere my first OGF creation. That was partly because I felt that, among all my sci-fi geofictions, it would be the easiest to adapt to the OGF “real world” style setting. I had to rearrange the geography completely to fit the peninsular Ardisphere of the novel into the oddly shaped, mostly land-locked territory in western Archanta. But I consider the adaptation to be successful: I cannot visualize Ardisphere at all in my mind now, without calling to mind what’s become the iconic shape of AR025. Since aliens weren’t allowed on OGF, and since I was living in Korea at the time, I made a spur-of-the-moment decision that my Ardispherian aliens would be Koreans. I don’t regret my decision. The Latin/Korean hybrid that OGF Ardisphere became is intriguing and has a lot of interesting cultural details. I am currently undecided as to the fate of the OGF version of the Ardisphere. One part of me still eagerly wants to complete (or more accurately, restart) the novel set there, with changes to “fit” the OGF setting. I see it as a kind of thriller/detective novel set mostly in VC, with travels to other OGF places – Jeongto, Tárrases, Ohunkagan, Gobras City… Further, It was only after embedding Ardisphere in OGF that I began imagining my characters might become aware they were in a geofiction, and begin manipulating it. This has given a great deal of new interest and impetus to whatever plot I finally come up with. Another part of me wants to restore the aliens and the high tech magic and re-draw Ardisphere on its own server, unconstrained by OGF’s strictures about verisimilitude. I also feel like removing Ardisphere from OGF because I’ve been so inactive with mapping there, and I feel it is not fair for me to occupy territory on OGF that I’m not actively working on. Here is Ardisphere as currently drawn on OGF (and link to boundary relation):

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Lekista.

I started a novel in around 2002 which was set in a steampunk universe, but in which the main character was modeled on Augusto Pinochet, of all people. I had been reading Pinochet’s autobiography, and I had had this thought: “That is a seriously sociopathic dude. There needs to be a fictional version of him.” So the story was, roughly, parallel to Pinochet’s life, and written from his perspective, but through the book you realize that the protagonist is a brutal dictator and he’s not a reliable narrator. It’s one of those “psychopath as protagonist” books. I wanted to create a parallel Chile, as a place where the novel takes place, but I wanted to change the details enough that it wasn’t recognizable as Chile. So I made it a steampunk setting, and I created a somewhat alien culture. Instead of creating a conlang or using Spanish, as in Chile, I made what still feels like an inspired decision to “hint” at a conlang, but not bother with actually creating it. Thus all the place names in Lekista are “translated” into English. You have the country’s capital, Holy Brighthorse. Other cities such as Castlepass, Feast Mountain, Dogschild, etc. The names lend a bit of a native American feel to the story and setting, since a similar thing occurred with a lot of native names, especially on the Great Plains: Sitting Bull, Red Lake, Crazy Horse, Moosejaw, etc. Eventually I gave up on the novel. I found fake-Pinochet’s mind too uncomfortable to inhabit. But I was quite pleased with Lekista, and drew many paper maps of the country and its cities. In 2013 I drew a map, just a sketch, where Lekista was integrated to Rahet. So as of the present moment, Lekista is just one of the many hundreds or even thousands of polities that exist on Rahet. I think one of the things I like about Rahet is that its diversity allows it to “host” so many of my formerly independent geofictions. Here is Lekista in JOSM.

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Senhar.

At some point while developing Ardisphere in 2015, I began thinking about Ardispherian religion. In the original, novelistic Ardisphere, religion and strange beliefs about psyche and the paranormal play a major role. But it’s largely “alien” and tied in with the aliens who intermingle in Ardispherian society. That was not an option for OGF Ardisphere. So since the aliens had become Koreans, it seemed logical for the alien religion to become … Buddhism. I created Gautamism as the OGF version of Buddhism, and made it the main religion in Ardisphere. Bear in mind that since the late 1990s, I myself have been a semi-practicing Buddhist, so this is not a stretch for me. In OGF-world, though, names must be changed. And source places, too. I invented Senhar to be the home of OGF Buddhism, and began drawing maps of it offline. It is meant to be an equatorial island nation, modeled on Sri Lanka (not the real home of Buddhism on earth, but an important nation for the historical development of the religion nonetheless). But in the center of the large island I placed an extreme highlands (over 5000m), which would allow me to also include an OGF Tibet. Thus Senhar is a Sri Lanka / Tibet hybrid country. Since I have zero competence in the Tibetan and Sinhalese languages, I decided to go the conlang route, and invented a Senharian language that would be a bit based on Korean (which I do know) but written using Tibetan characters. Here is a screenshot of Senhar from JOSM, which is where it exists for now, with incomplete contour work.

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If anyone ever creates an OGF India, it would be my intention to petition admin, at that time, to allow me to place the island of Senhar off that country’s coast.

Tárrases.

I created Tárrases exclusively because I felt I needed to try to make a microstate where I could focus and develop my mapping skills using JOSM and OGF. I wanted something I actually could “complete” in a reasonable amount of time. Secondarily, I wanted a place where I could allow my two main OGF societies to “meet.” Hence Tárrases was inspired by Spanish (Ardispherian) and Mahhalian cultures. I placed it as a libertarian enclave in dictatorial and theocratic Mahhal – a kind of Macau or Hong Kong to a Mahhalian China, in a geopolitical sense. I believe Tárrases is my finest and best-developed geofiction to date – exactly as it was intended. I’m very proud of it. As I was mapping it, I thought a lot about what kind of culture it was. I wanted something with maximal contrast to Mahhal’s rigidity, so I settled on a kind of libertarian-anarchist state. In fact, I was inspired by Tamarindia, which I pointed to at the beginning of this write-up. Tárrases was founded by pirates, who “stole” a Castellanese colony by making an unholy alliance with the Mahhalian aristocracy. They went “legit” and the Carapreta Dynasty, founded by the pirate Omar, has survived for over 200 years. Here is Tárrases as currently drawn on OGF (and link to boundary relation):

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Kshang.

I still believe in this project, but I’ve negected it hugely. I would someday hope to resurrect it in a more hospitable setting than hapless Rhododactylia. The

Kshang are imagined as a parallel to one of the many ethnic groups in South Africa (since I’d decided somewhat arbitrarily that Rhododactylia was a kind of OGF South Africa, maybe). I think in fact the Kshang began as a conlang, and the geofiction came later. It’s possible that I had a conlang that looked like Kshang even in high school. And I remember sketching maps for them, too, but they weren’t very detailed. It was meant to be a pre-modern society. But I know Kbloniksbhag (Bone House) was the “capital,” such as it was. I spent more time developing the Kshang religion and culture, and thinking about life in a traditional Kshang village. I think my effort to place the Kshang as a major ethnic group in Rhododactylia was a failure – mostly because I lost hope of that country ever being in any way a coherent geofiction at all. They need a home of their own, a little OGF Botswana or something. Here is Kshang as currently drawn on OGF (and link to boundary relation):

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Bofobunda.

I invented Bofobunda in 2016 (I think) at a point in time when I was thinking of a way to make West Commonia culturally interesting, in the way Gobrassanya is interesting. I had orchestrated the “divorce” of West Commonia from Commonia, and so I had intended to place some mapping there. I wanted a stand-alone project, so I created the Bofobundans. I got distracted by their language and culture, something vaguely southeast Asian but with a conlang written with the Farsi (modified Arabic) script. So I never uploaded any of the mapping to West Commonia. And I’m glad I didn’t – someone would have surely destroyed it beyond recognition by now. I “rescued” the Bofobundan culture from obscurity by placing them as a small minority in Ardisphere, with a concentration of population at the city of Lagartopolis, where they have a large, famous mosque. I would like to work on that more. Their home country remains unmapped. Here is the capital of Bofobundah, the city of Zhebeyem. This was my first experiment with contours and maperitive – a largely failed experiment.

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Makaska.

Makaska is my newest OGF project. Currently, I view its success as second only to Tárrases, and on a much larger scale. Unlike Tárrases, it’s far from finished. Like Tárrases, I think Makaska has been successful partly because I created it for OGF. It’s OGF-specific, and thus I don’t feel any regrets about editing out any formerly existing inverisimilitudinous elements, due to OGF’s rules. Once I’d kicked off the FSA project, I began thinking about how I could participate by taking on my own state, on the principle of “lead by example.” I wanted to make an exemplar FSA state. My thoughts turned to my years living in Minnesota. I had studied the Dakota language in college, there, and since I wanted my FSA state to have a strong “native” presence, and I wanted it to feel authentic, an OGF Minnesota seemed logical. I pulled out my trusty English-Dakota dictionary from college, and got started making up names. So far, I’m happy with it. It’s a work-in-progress, and is my main “active” geofiction, right now. Here is Makaska as currently drawn on OGF (and link to boundary relation):

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Deadlands.

The Deadlands is not the same as the other geofiction projects, above. The background is that for a while while living in Korea, I resurrected an old habit I had from the late 1980s – I started playing MUDs (text-based computer role-playing games). But when I started maintaining my own Linux server in 2016, I went further. I decided I should build my own MUD. So I started to. It’s currently offline, regrettably. It’s called Hellbridge, and it’s a post-apocalyptic/fantasy hybrid that takes place in an inverisimilitudinous setting called The Deadlands. Here is a screenshot of the Hellbridge MUD login.

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My intention was to actively integrate the OSM-style slippy map with the game, so that players could follow their progress in the game world with a marker on the website map. So I have been experimenting with non-standard tagging of nodes that I could tie into the MUD database through some kind of customized database procedure, such that a character’s “current location” could be tied to a pin on the map, google-maps style. Here is a map window (leaflet) with a test marker, showing the map-in-progress of the village of Goodgrove – intended to be one of the “starter villages” for new characters exploring the Hellbridge universe.


I don’t know what made me write all this, just now. Perhaps I grew tired of typing out the same explanations over and over on the OGFC Discord, or in conversations in the OGF Forums and diaries. So now I can just point people here. I might add to this write up with more detail over time. Music to do meta-geofiction to:

Apoptygma Berzerk, “Kathy’s Song.” picture

Caveat: HRATE

Since the school never calls me to do substitute teaching, and since it often rains outside, when I’m not working on studying history and psychology for my exams-for-credit, I continue with my activities and efforts related to my “fictional map server.”

Recently I’ve received several queries from people interested in trying to build their own “map servers.” I decided the concept needed a handy acronym, so I coined “HRATE” (High-resolution alternatives-to-earth – also, handily, an anagram for “Earth”).

I have been trying to collect in one place my documentation for how to build your own HRATE: here.
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Caveat: Click Here

The internet’s first “banner ad” turns 25 years old today. That’s actually kind of surprising. The internet feels like it’s always been there, at some level, but yes, in my own memory, there was a time it did not exist.
Some historians have placed the original “banner ad” on it’s own, 1994-style webpage: here. And you can click through to see the original advertisement, in the original format.
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Caveat: Where the eagles roam…

For some reason that I cannot quite explain, I found this linked news article incredibly funny. Apparently some scientists in Russia were using the cellular data networks and small phone-like devices to track eagle migration. They’d attach the devices to the eagles and use the network locations see where the eagles went. It’s a clever idea, and a brilliant repurposing of cellphone technology. However, they ran into a snag when the eagles promptly migrated to Iran and Pakistan, and started running up giant data roaming charges on the scientists’ accounts with their cellphone providers. Silly eagles:

The price per SMS in Kazakhstan was about 15 roubles (18p; 30 US cents), but each SMS from Iran cost 49 roubles. Min [a specific, named eagle] used up the entire tracking budget meant for all the eagles.

Caveat: Longtime geofictioning

[This is a cross-post from my other blog.] Arhet remains a work-in-progress. I’ve come up with two not necessarily incompatible tag-lines for the project:
  1. “Imaginary real estate doesn’t need to be a scarce resource.”
  2. “Sometimes you want to just toss verisimilitude out the window and map something crazy!”
I’ve been working on a kind of side-project, where I’m trying to get my MUD, called Hellbridge, to expose player location information to some kind of API or queryable dataset, such that I could then use something like a multimaps window in the wiki or wordpress to show player location on a map. This is a customization of the out-of-the-box CoffeeMUD platform I’m trying to use, and my Java programming skills are non-existent, which makes it difficult, but it would be a cool and unique feature if I could get it to work. I decided since I had very little that’s actually new to report, I could fill this blog-space with some ancient mappings. I have been doing geofiction since grade school. Here are two maps drawn on paper from a long ago era. This is the city of Nerro, drawn when I was aged 10. picture This is the continent of Preye, on a planet with a frequently-changing name (but colonized by those brutal Mahhalians). I drew it probably in high school, but I don’t quite remember. picture Music to map by: Cimafunk, “Ponte pa’ lo tuyo.” CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: another about face

I have taken the decision today to uninstall facebook from my phone.
About 11 months ago (at the point in time when I’d decided to move back from Korea to the US.) I had (re-)installed facebook on my phone. Facebook is incredibly useful for staying in touch with family and friends, and for providing a snapshot of my life to those people who are too entrenched in their internet ways to bother checking with my blog. There is no denying that has become a kind of indispensable contact utility.
However, I feel like the facebook app on my phone has changed its behavior, recently. It has become much more aggressive with its ads, with its auto-play videos, with the reams of clickbait to be found on the news feed. So I feel the need to take away the temptation to open it.
To be clear, I am not “quitting” facebook. Instead, I’m scaling back and rationing my participation in facebook, by limiting access to my desktop computer, where I can better control my interaction with the application. I will look for a way to make a daily crosspost from my blog, so people can follow me – I’ll keep up my “daily tree” tradition from there.
It may be that I succumb to temptation, and re-install the app once again on my phone, at some point in the future. Likely the next time I plan to travel, I’ll do so, at the least, because it’s very convenient to have facebook on my phone when traveling. But in the meantime, you’ll be seeing fewer posts on facebook – likely just the blog crossposts.
Thanks for understanding, and love to all.

Caveat: A year later…

[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]

This blog [meaning that other blog] is one year old today. I founded it on Saint Patrick’s Day, last year. That’s why there’s that little shamrock on the first entry.

I really haven’t posted as much as I intended, here, over the last year.

My life underwent such huge changes, mostly unexpected. I ended my 11 year residency in South Korea and moved back to Southeast Alaska. I’m still in a bit of transition in terms of career, and meanwhile living off my savings.

I took a break from the OGF admin team last summer, then worked really hard the last few months. I have become very frustrated with trying to do admin on that site. Indeed, I have become deeply disillusioned – mostly with myself, and my inability to maintain a charitable and good-willed mindset in dealing with a never-ending onslaught of faceless trolls and juvenile idiots. I’d rather cope with a classroom of unruly 7th graders.

In a few days, I’ll be traveling to my mother’s in Queensland for a few weeks: a long crossing of the Pacific. I’ll be constrained by obligations to relatives, so I’m taking a leave-of-absence from OGF and geofiction. I have resigned the admin position permanently. It will be hard to let go, but I feel I must do so for my own peace of mind.

Music to map by: Olga Bell, “Пермский Край.”

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: admin blues

[This is a cross-post from my other blog.]

<rant>

It’s all pretty depressing.

I try to be a competent and fair and innovative admin on OpenGeofiction.

Half the users hate me – I know this for an actual fact, because I see what gets said on the OGF unofficial discord channel.

And now I’m feuding with the “boss” too. I can’t win – I’m stuck in the middle. I’m not paid for this. So why am I doing it?

Perhaps I should go back to trying to build my own geofiction server and forget this. Although I derive a lot of motivation and inspiration from the OGF community, trying to be an engaged and active member feels like more suffering than benefit, some days. I would do better to not try to change or “fix” things, but that’s not in my character.

I don’t know if the creator of OGF and I really share much in terms of vision. To initial appearances, he seems committed to the “open-” part of the name, and to open source projects and concepts. Yet upon further examination, he seems utterly uninterested in trying to go anywhere toward working out a more scalable and/or sustainable governance model for the site. And for any sizable internet community (or real community for that matter), governance is actually important. So in the end, it’s just a personal fiefdom. I can feel sympathetic to that… – that’s probably how I would set my own site up. But then, what’s the “open” about? Is it just because he used the OSM stack? It feels like false advertising: “Bait and switch.”

This is just a rant.

</rant>

Music to admin by: Robbie Fulks, “America Is A Hard Religion.”

CaveatDumpTruck Logo

Caveat: Typepad broke my heart (and, not incidentally, broke my blog) today.

I found out today that my blog host, Typepad, has altered a functionality upon which I have relied heavily. I have, for the last 4 years, been hosting all my pictures "off-site" relative to the blog. This helps me keep them organized, helps me keep control of them from an "intellectual property" standpoint, and makes it easier to be "disaster resistant" in the event of problems with data integrity at the blog hosting server. 

It relies, however, on the blog host software respecting the integrity of the out-linking URLs for all those pictures.

If you scan through my blog today, you will see that all my picture links are broken. ALL OF THEM. Typepad doesn't approve of the link protocol of my picture-hosting server (i.e. it's "h t t p" rather than "https"). [And holy crap! – it's using some kludgey rewrite on the actual text of my blog entries – I can't even MENTION "h t t p" without it being "corrected" – hence the spaces in the mentions, here. So it's not only bad policy, it's bad programming, too!]

I have two possible solutions.

1) Migrate my photos to a different server, so that the links will work again (the current picture server doesn't accommodate the new, supposedly "more secure" URLs that Typepad is forcing on me)

2) Migrate my blog to a different host. All of it.

Both of these represent a lot of work.

I feel I can no longer trust my blog host with my data, however.

So much for the "lifetime guarantee." I have been with Typepad for 14 years. I had some intuition that it would come to a bad end, but I had hoped against hope it wouldn't. Such hopes were unfounded, as we can see.

I guess I have a new project to work on, to procrastinate on my taxes.

[daily log: walking, 4km]

Caveat: rich in entropy

We live in a weird era. Entropy has become a kind of commodity in and of itself.

In all this messing around with my new server… with trying out new things and tinkering with it all… well, of course I have to educate myself a bit about server security. It's a big, bad world out there, and if I'm going to be running a server that's publicly visible on the internet (offering up webpages, etc.) the little machine will be lonely and vulnerable, and I have to think about how to protect it from bots and blackhats.

In the field of network security, one thing that comes up is that you have to have some fundamental understanding of the types of cryptography used these days to secure systems. There's a whole infrastructure around generating "secure" public and private keys that computers hoard and exchange with one another to authenticate themselves. I really DON'T understand this, but I wade through the documentation as I e.g. try to set up a certificate authority on my server, because some of the things I'm running there apparently require it. I run the commands they tell me to, and hopefully my little server is sorta secure. But who knows.

I was fascinated to learn, however, about a thing that is used in crypto key generation on computers: system "entropy."

On one site I was looking at, there was a discussion about the fact that virtual machines (the sorts you rent from big companies to run cheap little servers, as I have done) have extremely low "available entropy" while your typical crummy desktop has very high "available entropy" – therefore when I generate my keys, I should do so on my desktop, not my server – I can upload the generated keys to my server later.

I think it's kind of a funny concept. The mass-produced, cookie-cutter, high quality, reliable servers found on the giant server farms are lacking in a certain commodity that they desperately need for their security: entropy. So the admins have to go out to their desktops to get the entropy they need. I sit here and I listen to my cruddy, 7 year old Jooyontech Korean PC-clone desktop, with its perpetually failing CPU fan groaning intermittently and the weird system noises filtering though the sound channel onto my speakers, and I can rest assured that that's all part and parcel of having lots and lots of good, tasty entropy that I can feed to my server in the form of so many sweet, generated security keys.

One site I was reading said that typical desktop entropy should be around 2000 (in whatever units entropy is measured with…).

Out of curiosity, I plugged in the Linux command that would tell me my system's entropy. I got 3770. Wow! I'm rich! … in entropy, anyway.

Meanwhile, my server, a virtual machine in some well-air-conditioned server farm facility across the Pacific in California, manages only 325 units of entropy. So sad. The chaos-poor, withered fruits of conformity.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Poem #600

my nam yu no
alligaytur
i want tu ete
a mungki, shur,
or stoodents, yum,
in ther nise haus
but meenwile tho
i lik the maus

– This poem is in a completely new form, recently emergent from internet memedom, called "bredlik." In fact it's a pretty structured form, with requirements of rhyme, meter, theme and even a kind of anti-spelling convention. You can read about it here - linguists have been observing its development. As that summary notes, the misspellings are not meant to seem illiterate or childish, rather, they in fact somewhat emulate the fluid orthographies of Middle English. I would add that the deliberate misspelling also successfully conveys the orality of the poem in the context of the overwhelmingly textual medium of internet-based forums and chats. So I decided to make my own, about my classroom ubiquitous alligator character.

Caveat: Geofictician

I decided to start a separate blog on my new website.

There is a long history of me creating new "blogs" for one specific purpose or another. The longest-lived of my alternate blogs was the one I maintained for my job and students for several years. That blog still exists but it's largely dormant.

The reason for this new blog is that, although I don't mind sharing my geofiction activities here on this blog, I'm not sure how open I want to be about the rest of my life with fellow members of the geofiction community where I participate. That is, do they want to see or do they care to see my poetry, my ruminations of day-to-day classroom life, my oddball videos and proverb decipherments? 

Since I think it's better to keep those things separate, I decided to make a separate blog. I also did it just to support the "technical unity" (if you will) of the website I've been constructing. 

I may develop a habit of allowing the things I post on that other blog to appear here, but not vice versa. This blog would be the comprehensive "all Jared" blog, while that would be a kind of filtered version for the geofiction community. 

Anyway, here's the blog (blog.geofictician.net), which currently has 4 posts, created over the weekend. Note that it seems like this blog will be fairly technical, representing the most abstruse aspects of my bizarre and embarrassing hobby, which might be termed "computational geofiction."

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Logofication

GF Logo

I designed a "logo" for my new website, this morning. The drawing is not really original – it's a free-hand consolidation of several images found online. For all that, I'm moderately pleased with the result, as a first draft.

I'm least happy with the vertical lettering – but the constraints of the drawn image, combined with fact that the logo needs to be square, made this the most reasonable approach, I thought. I'll work on it more, at some point.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: more hackings

Lately, I feel like I've been "on a roll" with respect to technical undertakings. And meanwhile, my creative efforts have been falling painfully flat. So I've shifted my efforts in my free time from creative work (writing, my geofictions, etc.) to computer tinkering. This is the sort of behavior that led to an entire somewhat-successful but ultimately stressful career in the 2000s.

I decided, in light of this, to go ahead and invest a few dollars a month in a hosted Linux Ubuntu Server. In fact, I already have another hosted server, but it's on Windows, which I'm less skilled at hacking, and mostly I use it as a ftp spot for backing up my data and as an image server for my blog.

Having an Ubuntu server allows me to deploy actual websites and apps rather than just have them running on my desktop. And, frankly, a hosted server is a lot more reliable than my desktop – assuming I don't blow it up through some hackerish ineptitude. 

So I clicked "Buy" early this morning and I made a server. 

I got one of my long-neglected domain names pointed to it: geofictician.net. I hope to get other of my domains pointed there too, over time. I have a half-dozen domains that I basically barely use: jaredway.com, raggedsign.net (my old business), caveatdumptruck.com (which points to this blog), etc.

So far, all that's installed is a skeleton of a mediawiki instance (i.e. an "empty" wikipedia, basically). That's because those things are really easy to install and give a very professional-looking result "out of the box." I'll see what else I can get installed, later.

Here's a link:

https://geofictician.net/wiki

See? It's really there.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: and, but no

This made me laugh, quite a bit.

First they came for the verbs, and I said nothing, because verbing weirds language
Then they arrival for the nouns, and I speech nothing, because no verbs
Then they for the descriptive, and I silent because verbless and nounless
Then they for me, and, but no

This very humorous bit of linguistics-based humor has been circulating on the internets. Attribution is vague – the best I could find with google is an attribution of the first two lines to Peter Ellis (whoever that is). I first ran across it mentioned the All Things Linguistic blog, and that links to another tumblr page (tumblr is a kind of social media "lite" blogging host – in fact, the All Things Linguistic blog is in that medium, but I guess its settings are more blog-like and less social-media-like). Finding attribution on tumblr is like jumping down a rabbit hole, and without an active tumblr account mostly I get bombarded with requests to sign up, and I'm not interested in going there. So if whoever actually made this up finds this here without attribution, please don't get upset – I did my best.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Glorious Days of the Internet, Episode 235,654,534

The scene and the problem:

We are doing last-minute prep for our talent show. Grace is doing some stage practicing with a group of her students, and she tells me, "I really need a fart sound for this play."

The play she's doing, the "Farting Lady," is a Korean classic tale adapted to grade-school EF, with songs, too. I may have mentioned it before on this blog – it's a perennial favorite of Korean students, because they know the story already, and because elementary children have fundamentally scatalogical senses of humor.

I can't use my laptop, because it's been repurposed as the main computer for all the projections, sound and powerpoint slides for the show. 

The solution:

So I take my little USB memory stick and I go to one of the computers in the computer lab. I go to google, and I type in "free download fart sounds." I have a plethora of choices. First choice, try out some sounds, and download a half dozen.

I save them onto my USB, and return to the seminar room where Grace is practicing. I hand her the USB. "The internet is a great thing," I say.

"It is," she agrees, as she tries out the files, to the entertained giggles of 15 or so elementary kids.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Post-5000

This is my blog's 5000th post.

Do you feel the excitement? It's palpable. Or something.

To celebrate, here is a new video from wacky robot-dancer Genki Sudo and his group, World Order.

What I'm listening to right now.

World Order, "Singularity."

I couldn't find lyrics to this – my Japanese-language googling skill is too poor. 

[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: Aan­ga­jaar­naq­tu­li­uq­tu­qa­qat­ta­li­lauq­si­mann­git­ti­am­ma­ri­ru­lung­niq­pal­lii­la­in­nau­ja­qa­tau­na­su­&&­an­naaq­tum­ma­ri­a­luu­va­li­lauq­si­ma­&&a­pik­ka­lu­ar­mi­jun­ga­lit­t

This satirical article at SpeculativeGrammarian explains why twitter is not a good idea for the fine residents of Nunavut. I actually have no idea if the Inuit phrases cited are authentic or instead just satirical inventions. The word/sentence “Aan­ga­jaar­naq­tu­li­uq­tu­qa­qat­ta­li­lauq­si­mann­git­ti­am­ma­ri­ru­lung­niq­pal­lii­la­in­nau­ja­qa­tau­na­su­&&­an­naaq­tum­ma­ri­a­luu­va­li­lauq­si­ma­&&a­pik­ka­lu­ar­mi­jun­ga­lit­tau­ruuq” has 199 characters, and allegedly means, “At a younger age it is said that I had also been saying that I wished drugs were never made!” Which might very well be something some anti-drugs Nunavutian politician might want to send out on twitter. So, indeed, it seems a linguistic injustice on the part of the twitterverse.
Relatedly (perhaps), I recently learned that Greenland’s 18th largest city, Ittoqqortoormiit, has 452 residents. South Korea’s 18th largest city is Namyangju, in Gyeonggi province (not far from my own home in Goyang, which happens to be South Korea’s 10th largest city, although, really, both cities are just politically autonomous suburbs of Seoul). According to the wiki thing, Namyangju has 629,061 residents.
Here is a picture of Ittoqqortoormiit.
picture
Possible spurious correlation of the day (?): The smaller the town, the longer the words.
[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: When the rivers freeze and summer ends

I posted this song quite some time ago (more than 5 years). I’m posting again because the video link at the old posting “rotted” (the so-called “link-rot” problem that long-lived blogs have), and anyway I never posted the lyrics in that old posting. It’s one of my favorites by Dylan.

Bob Dylan (with Johnny Cash), “Girl From The North Country.”
[UPDATE 2020-03-24: link rot repair (again!)]
Lyrics.

If you’re travelin’ in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine

If you go when the snowflakes storm
When the rivers freeze and summer ends
Please see if she’s wearing a coat so warm
To keep her from the howlin’ winds

Please see for me if her hair hangs long
If it rolls and flows all down her breast
Please see for me if her hair hangs long
For that’s the way I remember her best

I’m a-wonderin’ if she remembers me at all
Many times I’ve often prayed
In the darkness of my night
In the brightness of my day

picture[daily log: walking, 7km]

Caveat: the shining Big-Cheez-Burger

Apparently Longfellow's poem, "The Song of Hiawatha" has been rewritten in a LOLcat version (LOLcat, for those unaware, is a kind of internet 'meme' – i.e. a faddish and famous complex of behaviors, images and what might be called internet text-based dialect slang).

By the shores of Intar-Webbies,
By the shining Big-Cheez-Burger,
Stood the macro of Blue Kitteh,
Pièce de résistance, Blue Kitteh.
Dark behind it rose the sofa,
Rose the roomy gloomy sofa,
Rose the pics with lols upon them;
Bright before it post the comments,
Post the wry and funneh comments,
LOl@shining Big-Cheez-Burger!!

For comparison, here are the first ten lines of the original.

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.
Dark behind it rose the forest,
Rose the black and gloomy pine-trees,
Rose the firs with cones upon them;
Bright before it beat the water,
Beat the clear and sunny water,
Beat the shining Big-Sea-Water.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (American poet, 1807-1882)

Credit for finding this belongs to the linguistics blog All Things Linguistic.

[daily log: walking, 7km]

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