Rovlemhage's Library

My writing alt tumblr, Rovlemhage is my main.

[purple-buddha-project]

[byjoveimbeinghumble]

No it’s not. Panoramas like this are a painstaking, labor-intensive digital product, not made by just “rolling down a hill”.

This image, “Big Sur,” is part of a series called “Alterrnative Perspectives” by photographer Randy Scott Slavin. It is an example of stereographic projection. 

“Slavin’s circular panoramic digital technique is a way of seeing only made possible through digital methods and is an orientation he masterfully devised after much experimentation. The time required to capture the images and then create the photographs, which can consist of hundreds of photos “stitched” together to create a single 360-degree image.” (Amy Frearson, Dezeen.com. 2 July 2012)

[merry-miss-magpie]

Here’s some more of his work:

[mauzymorn]

I thought it was cool as is, but doubly so now with the right info

[she-who-fights-and-writes]

May you give some tips on how to write about the whole castles, royalty, peasants, knights type of story? Hehe thankies!

How to Write About Medieval Europe

The Medieval times play a huge role in many forms of media today, from TV shows to books to movies. It’s often romanticized and glamorized to make for a good plot, and sifting through what’s real and what’s fake can be a daunting task. 

Not to mention that the way of life in the Medieval times is vastly different from our lifestyles now! There was a lot more rules, a lot more pomp and circumstance, and a lot more death!

In this post, I’ll mostly be covering a time period around the 1400s to 1600s, with all of the classic knights, nobles, and kings and queens that everyone has come to know and love!

So how exactly do you write about medieval times?

1.Know the People

The Medieval times attached a lot more importance to titles and wealth than we do today. The number of names and titles can get a bit confusing at times, so please try to bear with me.

All of these are ordered from lowest rank to highest rank. 

Category One- Lower/Middle Classes (Could be collectively called Peasants)

1. Slave

Slaves are bought and sold, usually owned by nobles but sometimes purchased by some of the wealthier peasants to help out with farm work. 

They are seen as property and nothing more, and their masters can do with them as they please. 

There is rarely a penalty for killing or harming one’s own slave, but one may be punished for destruction of property if they killed or harmed a slave that wasn’t theirs.

2. Serf

Not a slave, but not free, either. 

They live on the property of a noble’s manor and are bound by the feudal system to pay rent in shares of their crops. 

They must ask the nobles permission to marry and to leave, but are overall left to their own devices. 

Their lives were still hard, however, and often they starved or fell to sickness. 

They remained serfs, however, mostly because they needed the protection of the nobles’ knights from barbarian invaders.

 If the manor of the noble was sold, the serfs came along with it.

3. Peasant

Peasants may be poor, but they are completely free. 

They often live in villages together and made their livings as masons, blacksmiths, tailors, shoemakers, farriers, carpenters, and much more. 

If they were particularly good at their craft, they may just earn enough money to be considered a noble; social mobility is not as rigid for peasants as it is for serfs and slaves.

Category 2- Knights

Knights are  in an entirely different category from the peasants and the nobility, though they are more closely associated with the nobles and garner just as much/if not more respect as them.

1. Squire

Essentially a knight in training. 

They accompany a knight on their travels and serve as their attendant, learning from the knight’s ways while polishing their armor and being their cupbearer.

2. Knight

Addressed as “Sir (Firstname)” for a man or “Dame(Firstame)” for a woman. 

Knights were hired to protect and are sworn to the code of chivalry, which is a set of rules that dictates behavior on and off the battlefield. 

For instance, knights weren’t permitted to fight an unarmed man or to kill someone whose back was turned. If an enemy was disarmed during a fight, the knight is supposed to wait for them to retrieve their weapon before resuming.

 Knights were required to be expert swordsman and bowman, as well as good riders. They also needed to be good at supporting their super-heavy armor

Category 3- Nobility

All of the nobility classes can have overlapping jobs; their titles vary on account of how much land they own. 

These nobles are given a fief, or a plot of land, by the King/Queen. They are then expected to pay taxes to the ruler and provide soldiers when needed.

1. Lord/Lady

Addressed as “My Lord/My Lady.”

2. Baron/Baroness

Addressed as “My Lord/My Lady.” 

Usually the spouse of a baron/baroness does not share the title and is simply referred to “My Lord/My Lady” unless they’re a baron/baroness in their own right.

3. Viscount/Viscountess

Addressed as “My Lord/My Lady”

4. Earl(Also known as Count)/Countess

Addressed as “Earl of (Place name)/Countess of (Place name)”

5. Marquis/Marquise

Addressed as “Marquis/Marquise of (Place name).

6. Duke/Duchess

Addressed as “Your Grace.”

Owns the most land out of any of the other nobles

Princes and Princesses can be granted titles of Duke and Duchess.

Category 4- Royalty

1. Princes/Princesses

Addressed as “Your Highness.” 

In traditional medieval Europe, the heir to the crown was usually the firstborn son. In the absence of a son, the crown will be given to the firstborn daughter.

They can also be granted other titles such as Duke and Duchess if their parents/siblings who come into power offer them land

A lot of squabbles/dramas caused by heirs; some killed by siblings in order to assume the throne

2. King/Queen

Addressed as “Your Majesty” or “Your Grace.” 

These rulers own all of the land in the kingdom and simply “rent out” property to the nobles, which can be revoked at any time. 

They levy taxes and have their own personal army to protect and wage war against other kingdoms. 

The nomenclature of Kings and Queens can be quite difficult, especially when marriage becomes involved, so I’m going to try my best to help:

When a King inherits the throne: If he marries a woman, she becomes Queen. If he marries a man, that man becomes a Prince.

When a Queen inherits the throne: If she marries a man, he becomes Prince. If she marries a woman, that woman becomes Princess.

2. Do Some Research If You’re Unsure

If you need help figuring out all of the dynamics and certain duties of all of these people, it can help to surf the web! Researching kingdoms such as England, France, and the Holy Roman Empire might help, though be careful; France had emperors and empresses at one point! 

There are very specific differences between different kingdoms, and you have to make sure you take those into account, especially if you’re writing historical fiction!

 3. Some Recommendations that May Be Helpful

Lucky for you, there are a TON of other books, movies, and TV shows that you’ll be able to draw inspiration from! Here are some things that I recommend!

Just a note, many of these aren’t necessarily medieval or focus a lot on fantasy, too, so I’m sorry if some of them aren’t exactly what you’re looking for!

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

Game of Thrones on HBO

The Crown on Netflix

The Witcher on Netflix

Reign on Netflix

Victoria on Amazon Prime

The Other Boleyn Girl (2008)

Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007)

Mary Queen of Scots (2018)

Hope this helped, and happy writing!

[rovlemhage]

World Building June Day Three

Who lives in your world.

Humanity still exists in the borders fall world and it eventually regrows into what it once was and surpasses it. But it’s still the same general people, and the same problems and solutions with perhaps a few words swapped to better fit the changed world. Culture has taken a huge hit, but does start to recover, and new cultures are born and grow out of the ashes of the old.

There is one kind of interesting current, one of the eras where they’ve started to explore deep space. One colony is founded by and for people who wish to live life free of the wild magic that had flooded Earth. They maintain decent relations with the main faction of humanity and most don’t outright hate the Twisted by the magic but they are fairly limited in where and how far away from the space centers they are allowed to go without escort or giving up their powers. For their long term stay.

The Twisted is usually used to refer to human’s who have been touched/twisted by the wild magic. But it could be used to refer to anything. Sentient, animal, plant or inanimate touched by the magic. But usually it will refer to anything sentient(even if only just barely anymore) that has mutations provided by the magic. Beyond the trait of being twisted by the magic it is basically a grab bag with little unifying traits. But there are a few common trends which I’ll discuss.

The most common is that the twisted tend to be fairly adventurous and this is either driven by just a strong interest in the unknown. Or a drive to try and find or develop new mutations that either work with the ones they have or maybe they are a mutation trader and they trade mutations by the way of using purge to pull some or all of the mutations out of other twisted and then can sell or trade them with others. I will cover purge probably when we get to magic in further detail.

Some of the twisted seek to explore the new world they’ve woken up to. By which I mean before the fall they might have been some kind of animal, maybe a plant in a garden or even possibly a rock and now suddenly their small or even non existent world has suddenly expanded into full on sentience and they are trying to discover everything.

And of course you have some seeking to go the other way, to give up their sentience and to live as the new kind of animal they exist as.

There are some who seek to master the wild magic and become mages, and others who seek to banish the magic from Earth and try to return to the world they once knew.

Some don’t even care too much about their magically altered selves and just live in the new normal being traders, travelers or maybe even farmers. Each twisted is after all their own person with their own goals. As diverse as humanity was before the borders fell, just with more arms and much longer lives.

Going back to humanity for a bit there are a few larger cities growing in the main era but for the most part it’s still smaller towns and caravans are mostly still using pack animals or just walking. The  Various Cults of Ford and other tech focused groups are starting to really reintroduce vehicles into general use. And of course if you need if you need to cross the land once known as the United States there is always the Screamer Express.

[yvesdot]

It’s… it’s okay if you’re not very good at writing? I don’t know if this is much of a controversial opinion, but you are improving, and you are consistently moving forward even if you don’t see it. Progress is largely practice-based, especially in writing, and even if editors and beta readers weren’t a thing that are actively helping you every time they give a critique (and, well, why do you think those exist in the first place? Nobody’s perfect), you would still be improving just by writing more and reading others’ writing. It’s okay if you’re not good at writing. That doesn’t mean anything about you, and it definitely doesn’t mean anything permanent.

[rovlemhage]

World Building June Day Two

Geography

Theres some rocks here… under the dirt and stuff.

Geography wise, this’ll be kinda on the shorter end, mostly because this is still Earth, just not Earth as we know it any more. The flood of wild magic didn’t really cause entire mountains to shift or completely disappear. It has caused some things to shift. The coast lines look kind of different and somethings have changed. The really big changes is not in the geography but in the biomes, there isn’t a single biome that hasn’t undergone some change.

Where once was vast desert now after the cataclysm there might be a swamp land. Or some kind of new swamp desert known as a Steam Desert. Mushrooms forests grow in place of a regular forest. Alien plants created either by the magic or maybe brought to Earth from distant worlds by it grow everywhere.

Of course several of the old towns and cities are still there, left to decay and become ruins, some have been replaced or in a few situations relocated. Stranger still are new ruins, almost uniform in their rubble as if the magic wanted to create a ruined city but could only copy and past.

As the years roll onwards these new biomes shift and change constantly altered by what lives in it, passes through it or the unpredictable whims of the wild magic. It’s rare for an entire biome to be replaced over night, but it can happen usually though minor Cataclysms( also know as Magic Storms or Cattys) will occur and introduce a pocket of some new biome.

This feels like a good place to start talking a little about the Eras because what era your looking at could change how Earth looks dramatically.

As was mentioned the Eras go from the days before the Fall of the Boarders. To humanity being an established presence in the space fairing community.

The specific eras and the names I gave them I’ll talk about them deeper in the history section.

In short summary the closer you are to the start of the fall of the borders the faster and more drastic the changes to the face of earth and this is also where the major geographical changes to Earth occur. And the closer to the space age you get the less changes occur. This is due to as time passed, the magic settled in and it’s concentration fell and also normalized over the whole rather than being thick in some areas and thin in others. As well as people and twisted(More on them later, but shortly the Twister are those who are twisted/mutated by the magic but retained[or gained] their sentience) have grown proficient enough with magic to slow, stop or prevent changes.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

World Building June Day One

Tell us about your world

Kay.

The big under pinning of bordersfall is a literal interpretation of the phrase, “You are what you eat.” By which I mean the more you of a monster the more you become that monster. Eating it’s skin will give you it’s scales, eating it’s legs will reshape yours, eating it’s brain will change yours too. Eat enough and you could become the monster in mind and body. This mutation can be controlled by force of will or by mastery of the wild magic that fuels it. But more on that probably when we talk about magic.

Genre wise I’d say this is sort of magic fallout with impossible creatures or something else with a theme of mutation and change.

Theme wise change would probably be a big one, I also started developing this world as a setting for a table top RPG, and one of the big things I wanted mechanics wise would have been this interplay between instinct and thought, this kinda bridge between gut feelings and knowledge to predict possibilities. A sort of Instinct vs Intelligence thing. Maybe I was never really able to make it work because I never had a good way to explain it. If I’d gotten the mechanic any further it might have been a bigger theme for the short exploration stories I’ve written set in this world.

Another big theme would probably be rebuilding or recovery considering I was gonna have sorts of Eras going from three days before everything explodes, to long after humanity has rebuilt and now explores the stars.

For this World Building June I’ll be focusing on what I was thinking would have been the “main” era, a kind of half way point between the disaster and the full recovery. Humanity has addapted enough to start managing to rebuild rather than just survive. Technology is coming back people are really starting to figure out how to wield the new magic with levels of mastery not seen before and some are getting really good at working with their mutations. Settlements are growing into towns or even a couple of big cities, and travel is starting to happen on a much larger scale and for more than just because they have to.

Name wise, well it’ Earth, I tend to call it borders fall earth, because that was the working name I had for the table top RPG this was all supposed to be fluff for. And I mostly called it Borders Fall for reasons I’ll get into more when we get to the history post. But the short of the long story is that the boarders protecting Earth from the wild magic fell allowing the wild magic to flood Earth.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 18

Year 18 day 45: Because your worth it, that's why I’m forcing you to get a suit.

(What are the fashion norms in your world?)18

So the first local born shop opened up, a couple of teens from the first generation born on this planet have opened up their own shop, they are a bit young only about sixteen-seventeen but honestly everyone’s interested in some new clothes, and they are a good couple of kids.

A lot of the more fashion conscious are exited to see what trends they start. Other’s are just interested in not having the standard pattern clothes we’ve been living with for the last several years. I like them they are comfortable and well good for working in. But they are generally not much to look at. Sure some people have taken the time and skills to make their own clothes but that just makes most everyone else conscious on their own clothes. Patches and iron on stuff got really popular for a bit. Some even just pinned cut pieces of cloth to their clothes.

So yeah it’s been fairly utilitarian till now sense most of what we did bring wore out a while ago. I’m thinking I might see if they can do a tux or something for me.

Also because I forgot to put it in one of my main logs rather than a personal one, the colony ship came back a couple of months after it left no luck on the easy retracing the path. Turns out the colony ship took a more convoluted route than we’d expected to get to here. Probably jumped to a couple different systems before it let us know what was going on. We’ve been trying to build several basic FTL probes to fly out to systems and transmit data if they detect any human ships to let them know what happened to us and where we are.

And the colony ship has been coming and going just in case they get lucky. And yeah I have private logs and mission logs because officially the colony ship’s mission wasn’t acknowledged to be finished by the founding colony so I still gotta make these mission logs.

Also we’ve officially begun translating the alien’s language, we’ve got some working consoles we can interact with and the linguists are gleefully poking at them like toddlers with a tablet. They think they have some basics for confirm, advance, back, no things like that. As well as some numbers but nothing solid.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 17

Year 10 Day 1: grounded

(What’s medicine and healthcare like in your world?)

Just got back from the hospital I knew I should have insisted on a full engine tear-down. Oh well no one died and nothing that couldn’t be repaired or replaced got broken. I’ve been having some odd readings from some engines on my cargo shuttle... I figured it was just usual wear and tear and went  told the mechanics to just regular routine it. That backfired when an outside lift load forced me to redline the engines which... caused the engine to fail the shuttle rolled and I threw twenty thousand Wocreds—oh yeah we sort of came up with a half way decent name for the work credits, it’s at least fun to say—of uh... sorry I’m audio logging this. Hard to type with a broken arm and full of pain meds... I was talking about something. Oh right thirty thousand credits of nutrition bars—the typical bland cardboard food bars in sci-fi everywhere—over the airfield fence and scattered them all over the landscape and cratered the airfield.

My shuttles dented and the damaged engine was crushed by the impact but from what the mechanics have told me it wasn’t repairable anyway so no huge loss I guess. In any case I also got thrown around, I have a bad habit of half standing when trying to lift outside underslung loads so i wasn’t in my seat with my seat-belts on. I got a concussion a broken arm and a cracked femur bone... least I think it was the femur. I’mmm... sure I’ll remember when it, when whichever bone it is starts to hurt when the meds wear off.

Oooh yeah. We got nice medicine same as most colonies. Medicine is mostly the same as it has been for humanity sense the twentieth century... ... Scientists and doctors working together to find new and creative ways to cure what ails you or letting germs grow old and feeble before putting them into body for your system to learn how to fight the less young... old germs of their type.

There’s a bit of herbalism mixed in new planets new plants new compounds new ways to deal with old issues. New plants... oh right I did get some progress on popped nebular berries if you dry them out to about twenty percent original water they pop without throwing oil and hot liquid everywhere they are great and actually sort of... uh... crunchy but not... ... ... *audio log terminated long silence detected.*

Uh those pain meds really sneak up on you, well the really good stuff they gave me before I left does anyway. I’m on the less awesome, less effective, less make you sound like an idiot stuff right now. And I can confirm it was in fact my femur that was fractured. Anyway medicine I’mma keep this short and sweet because I wanna get back to sleep. We got hospitals and doctors, and shrinks. Like I rambled on before twentieth century medicine but better for one our implants tend to work better with less failure rates. Pills are more effective and have less side-effects, vaccines cover more deceases and are somehow made even safer than they used to. Yadda Yadda. I’m going to sleep now

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 16

Year 6 day 234: To boldly go back down the road we got lost on to try and unlost ourselves.

(What magic exists in your world? Changed to Colony and Galactic governance because magic only exists in fiction in this setting.)

We finally got the colony ship ready and are sending it out with a skeleton crew, without colonists it doesn’t need as many people to run the ship. We’re hoping that they can follow straight back till the ship’s auto nav figures out it’s position again from there they can get back to our home colony and calculate a new route to, Oh yeah we named the planet finally, we’ve decided to call it Skyreefs, cuz of the empty ruins and the planets aquatic nature. Most just call the world whatever they want anyway and I’m sure we’ll rename it a few times before settling in on something but thats what it is for now.

Anyway the colony ship still has a couple of things to do before it officially departs but it shouldn’t take more than a week unless the ship is more banged up than we though. And we’re fairly sure it isn’t by this point.

In any case this has of course sparked a whole bunch of debate on whats gonna happen when we establish contact with the rest of humanity again. As for what the debate is over well. We’ve kinda got a unique thing going here. Without direct contact with the rest of human space we’re technically not apart of the Human Planetary Council. Which is basically the space version of the United Nations from Earth.

Every planet has a seat, if they so choose though if you really want things to be smooth with the others you sorta have to be. It’s got it’s powers and runs a small fleet, mostly meant to deal with the rare pirates and be ready to intervene if any planets start fueding too hard. But isn’t really a central government. Hence why I call it the UN of space rather than the New Republic of reality or the Space USA.

Most planets govern themselves and work with the HPC because it generally helps more than it hurts. Kinda like Greek city states. Largely due to message times, we wanna make a quantum entangled device for long range instant communications. And we do have them but the best we’ve figured out was the old fashioned telegraph systems. Dots, and dashes. But read by a computer, it’s more a problem of getting it to switch fast enough to be a data stream rather than just a jump node.

Anyway that’s off topic, So yeah arguments. we’d be the first planet set up without any central interference from the HPC and some are saying we should stay out of that and declare ourselves independent of it and or Start a new version of it for the planets closer to us. Message times back to the Sol system are almost a year or two long out here on the edge well for mass data anyway.

Also if the aliens show up again they argue it’ll make it easier to join them or incorporate them into our government. Slightly less red tape and all.

Speaking of the aliens there’s been a little more scouting of some of the ocean alien cities and they think they found a working console. They just aren’t sure if it’s interactable or not. Or if it’s just a weird monitor that sometimes reactions at just the right time to make us think we’re doing it. Still working alien tech is working alien tech. Here’s hoping before too long we have something we can actually work with.

Day 241: update

Whoo! The colony ship is away hopefully it won’t be too long until we’re able to talk to home, catch up with our relatives and... pass on the grave news to others. The closure has been too long coming. Oh also those quantum communication devices. Yeah we didn’t have one on the ship. Seems like an oversight now, I doubt that will go on for too long. Someone will probably develop a blackbox transmission device for ships using that system. Actually a few people here are already working on it. They figure the patent for it might help the colony grow.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 15

Year 4 Day 34: Space the endless frontier.

(What technology is used in your world?)

Yep everyone favorite optimistic sci-fi look at the future has been making the rounds, along with an old cartoon that sort of debates and more closely matches what we’ve got. Same people same problems just a couple hundred years into the future. Futurama hasn’t aged as well as star trek did but well that's pop culture references for you I guess. There’s also been one of my favorites Shrodenger’s Colony, a bunch of people are put into a virtual reality simulation to distract them from having to be stuck sort of awake for a few dozen years but unable to move. There’s all of this moral stuff of spying and wanting to see what they are seeing because the whole VR sim they live in is their creation but we can’t normally look into it. But it’s not our world it’s theirs and the act of just looking at it could break it because it wasn’t built to look at it. It’s weird and is basically one giant bottle episode but it gets really deep.

Then you also have another fav of mine, Contact. An entire series four full seasons done based on the idea of a human and alien colony ship landing on the same planet together. It takes the entire first season and a half before they can actually “talk” to each other it’s not until mid season three that there are some fluent communications. It’s not until the finally of the fourth season that they can really talk to each other.

But yeah it’s been a good year, the first born of the colony are turning two, well cept for the oldest who’s turning three but there’s still argument exactly which side of the midnight line he was born on and how it should be counted. Either way it’s nice to see people settling in, we still wanna find the rest of human space. But this is home now, and heck maybe we’ll even find the aliens.

Good news on that front, we’re finally at the point where we’re ready to try and repair and refuel the colony ship. We’ve got the industry now, now it’s more a lack of people. Robots are helping but well everyone wants to be careful about the whole robots building more robots thing. Too much sci-fi but I get it.

I’ve actually taken the shuttle up into space a couple of times to deploy some new communications satellites. But with the colony ship it’ll be easier, they were built to be reusable and are way more fuel efficient than my little nine hundred ton shuttle. Lifter shuttles would be the best, but we’re not ready to build any of those yet.

Tech wise here on this colony we’re well we’re behind probably the rest of the human space. Like I said it’s more a manpower issue than actual industrial ability. But it’s still hobbling us some. Yeah we got humanoid robots to help us. But it’s not like we can just say here’s your citizenship card and here’s your job details hop to it. They still need guidance, and maintenance. Also while we’ve got some kickass learning programs and stuff. We still don’t have a true artificial intelligence, just really smart programs. We do have multi-material 3d printing, it’s hypnotic watching those things print new circuit boards.

Still can’t do that Richie Rich thing of dumping trash into a machine and having it all molecularity messed with into stuff we can use. Honestly i get the feeling that if someone from earth in the early to mid two thousands saw our tech levels they’d be disappointed. Oh sure we have ftl drives and flying cars. But we don’t have AI’s trying to kill us or save us from ourselves, no green aliens to date and no massive space empires with ships shooting lasers at each other. It’s just kinda earth but with an extra plus one or two in tech.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 14

Year 3 Day 60: I aim to eat all the berries.

What do people eat in your world?

So I get why people like some of the old media, Some of it is just timeless and just good. Like Firefly or the remake it got in 2256.

It’s started a whole craze here we’ve actually gone and named a few things such as the research camp down by the Twilight Gates is now Jaynestown. And the smaller valley over the hill from Twilight Valley where we’ve set up we’ve decided to call Serenity. There have been a few other attempts at name chances. Someone suggested we call the planet Miranda, but that was shot down because of well some of the baggage that comes with that.

Also the colony ship from Straud to Firefly but there’s a strong effort to keep it as Straud because of the nature of the story for which it was named and well because of the parallels with what happened to us.

There was also a suggestion to rename the central colony city to Arlington. And I do know of a hill most people just call Hank’s Hill.

Anyway to finish up some thoughts from last entry, I was getting around to mentioning that we tend to eat a mix of local and heritage foods. Of course here we’ve had to make do with mostly local foods, we just had the basic food and industry crops in the first shipment. Well cept for one botanist who had the foresight to forgo most of their personal allotment to bring various spice and herb plant seeds. The farmers have been working on getting those to where there’s enough for everyone. Of course said botanist got first harvest of the spices, fairs fair after all. They also focused on finding local plants to help suit our desires.

We’ve actually set up a couple of research bases, one by the Twilight Gates, a couple dotted around the valley. Actually one is at the foot of Hank’s Hill and there’s another one near the coast. they've been bringing in fish and checking out some of the local sea plants. We might get maki sushi yet.

We’ve been slower to try and incorporate land meat into our diet, we don’t have many specialists as far as land fauna goes. So it’s been slower to domesticate, and evaluate for poison and what not.

I know I’ve been missing popcorn or even pop rice, they think they found a local rice alike but it doesn’t pop, or taste very good by itself almot more of an herb really. The local maze alike is more promising but we only just got some outta the marshes where it grows. Hope it pans out, no pun intended. Movie time just hasn’t been the same without some kinda snack to go with it. I know one desprate soul’s been putting everything and a half into the fryer to find something. I wonder when they might try the Nebular berries. Huh they are a bit startchy on their own... maybe.

P.S. it sorta worked, might wanna try drying them out some, I’ll do that in batches see if I can find a level of dryness that works best. Gonna have plenty of time while the fire damage to my house is repaired anyway. Maybe try outside next time too.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 13

Year 3 day 23: Nebular Berries that's what those Blueish purple nebulous berries were.

(What plants cover your world?)

So yeah finally got the name of those berries, turns out they were local I thought they’d been imported from on of the other worlds. Probably good I didn’t go looking for a name back then. Other wise I’da been stuck naming them and that would have been a disaster I’m sure.

In any-case I bring it up because something interesting has happened with the farms this year, We’ve finally incorporated the first few local foods into the farm’s we got a whole field of Nebular Bushes planted, as well as a local plant similar to maze from Earth. A couple of fruit bearing trees, and one that we actually harvest vegetables from. It’s roots do this funky in and out thing but the soft ends of the roots are good eating. Kinda like a carrot or a Shivck shoot.

Also we’ve had some decent progress on domesticating a couple of local animal species, still no luck with the Furlwhirl but a branch from the Flurlis Family tree seems to be more well caffeinated. Oh that does remind me.

So on earth they had this whole animal kingdom and everything belonged to some branch of the tree of life. Well we still sorta do that but rather than try to shoehorn everything into the same branches from Earths tree, which they did to little success on the first colonies. They decided to simply things every planet, has it’s own tree of life and everything on that colony is categorized according to it’s branches not the branches of another colony. Sure the Furlwhirl may look like a sheep from Earth’s tree or a Wollytoad from the life tree of Tursis. It’s not in the same animal family, because it didn’t come from the same tree as the others.

So yeah, every colony has it’s own tree of life and while we compare between similar branches no species is officially categorized by another colonies tree of life. Unofficially we’ve all written a sixth grade paper on how the Karsis eight limbed furry lizards are basically an honorary member of the cat family.

Not that we got any on this colony, not yet anyway once contact is established hopefully we can get our animal shipments.

Oh I didn’t mention that last time did I either. So yeah being the frist colony ship our focus was mostly early city building and expansion and basic needs for self sufficiency. Food, water, shelter and production. As such our ship was decked out with well the basics, we got what we needed to set up and expand, grow and repair our own industry without help but it would be a lot slower... and it is.

We didn’t have animals or livestock however, we did have a mix of seeds, starts and other flora from the various colonies that could prove useful. Good food stocks, quick growing lumber plants that kind of stuff.

So we lack in cows and rats but we got corn and bamboo and bamboo accessories. Oh also a big old matrix of human entertainment history. Which has just dug up an old show from earth for rebroadcast King of the Hill. It’s weird seeing something made hundreds of years ago. There’s actually a context guide to go with it, I don’t see how people can get so into these old shows but then again a lot of them are also interested in either the time period it was made in, or the time period it was set in.

Huh sounds like they dug something else out to play, Firefly or something. Could be interesting.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 12

Year 2 Day 63: you can domesticate them but never forget they are still animals.

(What creatures inhabit your world?)

Well a week later and I can tell you what the commotion was. Turns out we had our first death. A wood worker was getting some extra wood for a project of theirs when they were jumped and killed by some local fauna. We haven’t had any major problems with them till now. Guess that means we’re just a normal part of the world now and not something to be feared, lucky us.

Sorry it’s taken me so long but well once that happened we had to send out a team to find and kill the creature to make sure it didn’t try to hunt more of us or entice others to do so. As well as to set up way more security, go through some self defense and weapon’s training and a few other things.

I got my tablet, this is the first time I had the free, had the interest in using it. Forget it. I’mma just write down these creature notes before I forget them again.

Prowler: furred four legged predator, hunts alone lives in a pack. Reasonably social and very dangerous. They love to stalk through the intertwined limbs of the trees and drop down on their pray. They’ve avoided us even almost seemed friendly in some way. We still steered clear of them though, better safe than sorry. Guess we didn’t try hard enough.

Krilgon: large four legged lizard, analogous to a Komodo Dragon, Gilia or some kinda Crocodile. Large, dangerous does not move much. Tends to just sit in one spot and not really move unless it wants to eat and something gets close enough to eat. Seems to eat most anything, meat, fruit, veg. One colonist claims to have seen one get a bite out of a tree once. Tends to go for smaller things, probably less energy to beat. Will usually ignore you unless you aggravate it.

Furlwhirl: Think sheep but always in need of one more cup of coffee because it’s too early to deal with your shit. We’ve been trying to domesticate them, but while they are herbivores these one’s survive by being mean enough to be left alone. Their fur could make nice yarn though, or so those who’ve been rolled over by them attest from it’s touch.

Hivers: an uncommon but kinda tasty bug, sorta like bees and ants. Produces honey like substance but seem to use it as a defense thanks to stickiness or sacrifice to be left alone by things that might try to eat them.

Snackers: Tiny fish, abundant and tasty specially with pickle juice and what we’ve been calling  Zone Raddish in honor of some old horror show, Twilight Zone. Seems to be fresh and salt water. Sorta like salmon but well small. I can easily get a couple of dozen in a handfull.

Saxaphone Blues(Pipe Onager): Eel or snake like fish with some wicked teeth and a tendency to always be bent and avoid being straight. Likes to Eat Snackers but will take a bite out of most anything given half a chance.

Those are some of the ones we know the most about thanks to them being common in the local area, we know little about the ocean’s horrors but I’m sure we’ll find stuff. Like a lot of planets, we can find animals that are sort of analogous to Earth or other planets but there’s rarely a perfect fit. In all honesty though this place is a little less focused on land animals likely due to the less land than Earth had.

The eco system is thriving on land still though, I can only imagine what it’s like under the water. There have been talks about building some kinda sub or sub drone and checking it out. As well as some of the underwater ruins. Maybe the water will have kept something in a functional state?

Right now though most everything has been tabled in favor of making sure we’re safe from the local fauna. We’ve got walls up but a lot of it is simple chain link or even just closely spaced metal bars. Better walls are going up in those spots but we figured something was better than nothing.

Of course the long term solution is to set up some kinda animal control and study the local animals more. Five hundred things to do and only enough time to do fifty of them.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt 11

Year 2 Day 56:Tv no guilk-ling?(You don’t speak galactic common?)

(What’s language like in your world?)

I can’t believe we’re gonna fight about this now, then again if they wanted to fight for it now’s the time to do it rather than then when all of the official stuff is laid in.

So yeah there’s been a debate about what the official language of the colony should be, some want to make it the usual mix, Galactic common, and then the ones from our home colony, so English and Swedish and finally Spanish.

Others are saying we should do it by the three largest, Common, English and Spanish, and you’ve got a final group saying we should ditch common and just go with English.

And everyone is shouting over everyone else about who’s right. And before you say why not just make up a new language and use that, well one humanity did that a while ago, It’s Galactic Common(aka Common) and two there is a group calling for that too but they are in the minority because few people wanna take the time to learn a new language right now.

Personally I fall into the first camp mostly because it sounds the simplest and we don’t need to debate or find out who knows what just in case secretly over half of the colonists know Klingon or Elvish or something. But I’m staying out of this debate as much as I can, to the point where no one is allowed to sit with me in the cockpit on flights anymore. I wear my headphones in public, and hide behind the first potted plant I see at a party.

Okay so Galactic Standard, came about when people started to argue about what language should be accepted as the standard for international co-operation on deep space and colony projects. Everyone had a preferred language, usually their own. People argued over if it should be the most commonly known language, or maybe the easiest to learn or something else. English, Spanish, Esperanto, Klingon(nerds).

Of course this spread from the people actually making the decision to well everyone else by the time they’d figured out the decision they were gonna make. They got flooded by arguments, letters and everything from people. Bribes, threats, insults, compliments, twenty paged arguments. Which made them angry and in a rare moment of true human nature showing through an elected bureaucratic body. Decided that a new language would be made up independent from all languages before it and it would be the Common language.

And so the linguists set about creating what would be called Galactic Standard. Designed to be easy to learn, phonetically consistent to avoid any these are the rules and these are the exceptions to the rules you’re just gonna have to memories on their own. To sound like it’s own language and not imitate existing ones too close and to not beg, borrow, or steal anything from existing languages. It’s perfectly serviceable, and also perfectly boring. But we keep it because by Gott we all had to learn it so our kids are just gonna have to suffer through it to.

Lets talk about something more interesting, I should be getting a personal computer again, well a tablet but still it beats having my hand cramp every twenty minutes. that’ll be nice, I can do video logs again too. Should make it quicker for me too. As for anyone wondering but didn’t you use one back on the ship, sort of yes sort of no. It was more like the old style terminals, the central processor was else where and your interface was just sending and receive the data to and from it. Hence the book sense we stopped living in the colony ship... well unless there’s a nasty storm.

Anyway we’re at the point where they have spares from the stock being made for essential personnel needs, technically as a pilot I don’t need one cus of the shuttles interfaces and what not. But it does let me do some nice things like interface remotely and remote controlling. So thanks to that I got higher placement on the secondary list and didn’t have to write in on the lottery. So I should have a new one soon. It’ll help alot with the percision landing   of  hea vy c A rgO-

There’s some kind of commotion going on I’m gonna go see what is going on.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt Ten

Year 2 day 1: happy founding day, aka yay we didn’t all die in cryo sleep

(What holidays & traditions are observed in your world?)ten

Two years, hard to believe we’ve been here two years well two local years, it’s been about two and an eigth Earth years. Hopefully the celebrations will be a little more joyous than they were the first years. Now that everyone’s settled in and things are still progressing well, the future looks bright and the accidental stranding we’ve experienced won’t weigh as heavily on every one.

Normally founding day is a happy day meant to celebrate the colonization of the world we’re on, and the bravery and tenacity of those who came before us and gave their lives to make our lives possible. Honestly it almost takes on a Dia De Los Muertos vibe in most of the older colonies, and on some of the younger colonies as well, because they won’t just celebrate their founding but the founding of the colony or colonies that they sprung from you know.

Kinda like how the Beta Siganus colony celibates the founding of Fortuna it’s father colony, and the founding of the Alpha Centauri colony which fathered Fortuna. And Earth for being the cradle we all grew up in. Here we’ve chosen to celebrate the safety and the luck, good design, or gods that got all of us to the colony alive. As well as our lack of issues in setting up the colonies and the lack of aliens who want us dead for suddenly intruding on their world.

Some said it wasn’t the brightest idea making our founding celebrations make note of the misfortune that’s left us cut off from the rest of humanity and many of us to never see any of our loved ones that didn’t come with us. But several also argued that we should to remind us to be cautious so we can try to survive to see our loved ones again because we won’t stay out of contact for ever. We have the ships logs and once we can repair and refuel it we can retrace our steps. The captain also argued that we had to confront those feelings less we leave them to fester into something greater.

So yeah the founders day celebration happened the first year but it was a hard sell, and tended to be more muted than the planet wide three day party some of the older colonies have had. A lot of us got to try some local flora that the scientists were sure was safe for us to eat now. I hope I’ll get to try some of that blueish purple nebula berry... I have got to find out the name of that thing... or maybe name it myself, that would be fairly cool.

Of course founding day shouldn’t be confused with founders day, which is usually the day the last original founder of a colony dies. The day the last member of the first group of colonists to put it more clearly. It’s typically way more somber and is usually left to more local cities towns and neighbor hoods what they do. Usually the government will have some speeches or shows talking about it run on the radio and government channels.

It’ll probably be a long time till we can celebrate launching day, those tend to be a lot more informal and also tend to stop being celebrated after a few years. Basically when your colony is the starting site of a new colony ship, the day the ship launches is launching day. The day your colony gave birth. It’s more focused on as a sign that your colony has grown and hit a new point of maturity that it’s generating it’s own colonies.

Ah, that sounds like the band is starting, guess the celebration is starting now. Write to you later future me, book, people snooping in my diary.

No cake for the rest of the week for people in the last party mentioned.

[rovlemhageslibrary]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt Nine

Year 1 Day 78: The church bells ring the praise for life to the gods ears.

(What are the religions and cosmology of your world?)

I’m just like we have the usual human mix of political spectrum we got our usual mix of religious views as well. The three big ones and all their little fractures and denominations. Christian, Protestant, Shia, Sunni, Jew. All of them, still have fairly strong representation across the planets humanity has settled over the years and they seem to be commonly represented across all of the planets, And have their representatives here as well.

Course it gets interesting when you spread to other worlds, a lot of some of the older gods, like the Greek, Norse and Egyptian gods had something of a comeback. Lots of visions and dreams experienced by the early colonists, most tend to chalk that up to poor radiation shielding, stress and mental breaks. Others to evil forces from their religions leading others astray, the devil lead them to false gods and all of that. The still though sense colonizing other planets the largest denomination has actually been a lack of religion, atheists are the most common and out number any single religion humanity has, but put all of the number of atheists next to the number of all religious and you get about equal numbers.

But all of that is boring and sorta normal, Time to speculate wildly about things we don’t have more than an inkling of a clue about.

The aliens and their religion, at least... we think. After going through a bunch of the murals in The Twilight Gates, and some of the other ruins we can find. The cool thing is, we suspect we have a good idea of generally what the aliens looked like. Seems like they were an aquatic or amphibious bipedal, some fins and maybe gills. Probably scales or maybe smoother skin like a frog or salamander. I bring that up because while several of the murals, reliefs and other picture’s we’ve found, present a picture that matches that, there are several we’ve found that seem to not follow that, sometimes by showing extra arms or legs. Sometimes replacing the legs with a single fin kinda like a mermaid.

Or they go even wilder, extra eyes whole new limbs, tails or in some cases they don’t even look like the same species. Some have speculated this might have been memorials of meeting other alien races, or other species native to the planet. Or maybe one of them is the local alien race and the rest were the deities or memorials to a race that had been encountered.

Personally I figure that the odd ones out are the gods or what not, mostly because it’s more fun trying to figure out what they all represent. There’s this one that looks like a fat sumo golem rock thing with smoke coming out of it’s head, and if that isn’t some kinda volcano god I’ll eat a hat.

Then there’s this really slender long limb’d one with extra large fins, most are speculating that it’s some kind of beauty or fertility god, I like the idea that it’s their version of Hermes, some kinda messenger, travel or speed god.

We suspect they have some kinda pantheon of gods, but well like I said it’s all wild mass speculation. We still haven’t had a lot of luck finding any working machines we can interact with. With that we can maybe start figuring some words out or guessing anyway. Confirm, return, no; words like that and maybe a few others. Linguists figure from there we might be able to start guessing other words. Unless we get some kinda stupidly lucky and get a rosetta stone style thing.

Those are the deities I’ve got head cannon for, gotta look at the pictures again for anything further.

[rovlemhage]

WBJ2019-Diaries of Straud: Prompt Eight

Year 1 Day 67: Vote today for a better tomorrow.

(How is your world run? Who’s in power?)

I voted.

Not like there was actually a lot to vote for at this time. Most positions in the government had one runner and they were unopposed. The few who were running against others usually only had two candidates. Interestingly the top position was one of the unopposed, most people didn’t wanna be in the first run because they either just wanted to do their jobs, without having to also do their government tasks as well because right now, most jobs are considered critical and while you can do anything you want, you gotta do that task as well. So you can be a professional shoe shine, but if you’re a precision electronics engineer you still gotta make our circuit boards too… feel free to polish them nicely though. Also if the whole thing falls apart or doesn’t work no one wants to be label-able? Labeled? Shoulda been a linguist One of the ones pointed at for who’s to blame.

As for how well we’re keeping it simple, kinda a basic democracy right now, everyone directly votes for people running for office and for any laws constitutional changes and that kind of stuff. We got the top dog called a Presidential Overseer, then we have the Council who can override the overseer, and vice versa. And then we have a third set called, well unofficially the watch dogs, officially the position is called the court, who watches the other two and in addition to making sure they follow the laws, acts as a tie breaker should the other two positions deadlock.

And we have the secretaries nominated by the Preseer(I’m trying to coin this as the short term of Presidential Overseer) and confirmed by the Council. Their task, make sure the stuff they are secretary of is running smooth and be ready to make recommendations and answer questions as the need arises. So if we need to know how the farms are doing we go to the secretary of agriculture. Don’t know why we didn’t just call them Overseers, ask the guy really into United States history.

We’ve drafted a constitution and put in legal ways to change it as the colony grows and stuff, kind of the standard for most colonies, and yes we added in alien’s rights to the constitution.

But yeah possible change in the future, right now we went with direct democracy because the colony is still fairly small, we’re planing to change to a representative democracy at some point in the future, I’ve heard a few with political learning throw around a hundred thousand as the magic number. I don’t know personally, I’m just the blue collar heavy cargo shuttle pilot who majored in underwater welding. I also got a certificate in underwater basket weaving… No seriously, I got a cert in it. Why? Because I already had all of the credits I needed for it, and how could I not participate in the joke.

As for the aliens well we’re not sure, we think we found some art of some kind of significance but we don’t know. Maybe of a leader, or of a religious figure, a god of some sort. Some suspect they might have been independent city states for the most part, kinda like ancient Greece. Due to the lack of visible communication or travel lines, then again those could have grown over and rotted away a long time ago. Some say some kinda kingdom, or autocracy, or democracy even. We probably won’t ever know unless we find a library and a way to translate their language. To figure or find any of that we need to find functional tech for that first. Time will tell.