At Südwegen we have a constructed language called Tocharian X used in encryption and cryptology. The language is very complex and highly irregular to the point that its own creators cannot speak it.
Part of its complexity is due to the irregularity and uniqueness of its vocabulary.
For example, Arabic, a complex language, uses a simple mechanism for word creation.
From the root ktb:
kataba - (he) wrote
kitāb - book
kātib - writer
katībe - document
kuteyyib - booklet, brochure
kitābe - writing
mekteb - office
mektebe - library
mukātebe - correspondence
miktāb - typewriter
iktitāb - subscription
Despite its complexity, Arabic has a simple way to create words from roots.
Serbo-Croatian also uses root words in a different way.
pisati - to write
časopis - journal, magazine
životopis - memoir, biography
ispis - printout, copy
opis - account
potpis - signature
putopis - travel book
rukopis - handwriting
Tocharian X avoids using root words so that words cannot be matched at all and the language cannot be deconstructed easily.
This is how it would sound like in English:
A man writes. He is an author. He has a book. It is a novel. That is literature. It is in the library. He works in his office. He has a desk.
Tocharian X avoids reusing the word “write” as a root word, so instead of saying typewriter or writing-machine, a word like daktilo is used.
Words like script, conscript and description are replaced with screenplay, recruit and portrayal, to make it more difficult to link them together, trace them to script and ultimately back to “write.”
Words like paragraph and autograph are replaced with words like passage and signature to increase complexity. Since this is a new language, there would be new words coined for each word - a word for a regular person’s signature, a word for a doctor’s prescription and a word for a famous person’s autograph with nothing in common between them - no sign-, -script- or -graph. The verbs sign, autograph and prescribe and would be a new word entirely and so would signatory and such.
New words are coined so that nothing is ever expanded - doctor, medicine, medication drugs, health, heal cure, sick, sickness disease, etc.
This is a simplified explanation for a long story and it’s a long intro to a very short post.
Studying and understanding complexity also helps us understand simplicity.
Some of the staff involved in Tocharian X have their own projects in creating constructed languages.
The Arabskii Project is an attempt at creating the simplest dialect of one of the most difficult languages in the world.
North Slavic is another project, albeit with slightly different goals and methods, that goes for simplicity through regularity and predictability.
Südwegen Snow is also a motor company, although our vehicles are very quiet and often unmanned.
We make dollies and drones, some for a camera and its operator and some remotely operated. We even make programmable camera+vehicle rigs where a the vehicle can follow a moving target on reaching a certain point, the mount could tilt the camera’s axis, camera would refocus the lens, change modes (to high speed/slow-motion, for example) and then switch again when it reaches another position. It all works together - the driver, the neck of the camera, the eyes of the lens and the brain that processes them all - and camera, mount and vehicle would all follow the playbook.
And because nothing is perfect, the playbook allows for exceptions so that a bump in the road doesn’t result in a wasted shot. If the subject moves out of the camera’s view, then the camera can make the drone go faster; if the subject is too far, then the camera can make the lens refocus or the drone come closer.
Our vehicles may not make you think of speed, freedom, the open road and wind your hair - ours follow strict paths and timelines, but they bring creative freedom to the hands of directors so that their wildest, freest imaginations are within reach.
At Südwegen Snow we are a lot of things, but we are also a photographic film company.
Although we were early proponents of digital photography, we have always believed in analog film. When we released our first film stocks, we were competing with a giant icon not just of cinema but of American culture and history.
Kodak to us was not just the film that came in gold boxes - it was the gold standard. That was the standard that we had to reach and that was the competition who we had to beat.
We wanted to be not just better than Kodak, but bigger too, but we never thought it would come to this.
We’ve welcomed many former Kodak employees into the Südwegen family and we like to think that although Kodak has always been our competition, a small part of Kodak is now part of our DNA.
It’s true that the golden days of analog film have gone and we now find ourselves in a race with fewer and fewer competitors. Südwegen Snow may never be as big as Kodak once was, but we hope to be just as great.
When we started making phones, RIM/BlackBerry was a giant and we were nobodies. It is crazy to think that BlackBerry is moving away from having their own phone OS and moving toward Android, while our SnowOS is still surviving.
We aren’t here to gloat - we ourselves don’t like the homogenization of the market. We have nothing but respect for BlackBerry and we want to learn from them - not only from their mistakes, but from their many, many successes.
BlackBerry’s operating systems were not custom for novelty’s sake, but for quality and security’s sake - and that is what we strive to do.
And while the consolidation of the smartphone OS market has some worried, SnowOS users should not worry about us. We’re not going anywhere.
Some of us grew up on Nintendo, others grew old playing Nintendo. It’s a company whose games we looked up to and we still look to for inspiration for our games.
The Super Nintendo, with a 16-bit CPU, 15-bit color, 240p resolution, 32 khz sound and 128 kB of RAM (compare that to the specs of any phone) they made games that were more fun than most games today, whether on touch-screens, high-precision & low-latency game controllers, mouse+keyboard or VR.
We can now emulate their consoles and games on our phones, but we hope more to emulate their game-design and their quality in our own games.
The .flm container can store a single video with different points of focus synched to the same time and sound track. Think Lytro for video.
However, for smooth playback, it is best if used with the strom codec, where the video size is reduced by compressing duplicate information not just of subsequent frames, but the parallel videos as well.
We won’t tell you do this or don’t do that in terms of design. But have some design principles, some philosophy, some sort of reasoning behind making something one way or the other.
This is a page from an informal design code we follow at Südwegen. We instituted this because we worked in companies where developers thought the product is the code, not the final software. They saw it from their perspective, not from the perspective of users.
We split to form a company that cares about its customers, about its products and its designs.
Burgrave Magazine, our print-only quarterly, started out as an online magazine called “Scanned”?
We literally printed one copy of every issue of Scanned, scanned it as an image and distributed it online as a PDF.
“Why?” you may ask. It was our way of bringing a sense of the analogue and a sense of permanence in an increasingly digital and ephemeral world. Scanned is the polar opposite of the deleted tweet. We thought about what we had to say, said what we thought and meant what we said. You may think of it as hipster contrarianism, being different from the sake of being different, or Südwegen being a dinosaur, stuck in a world of tape and film, ink and paper - two different worlds, the post-modern hipster and the anti-digitalists, but we’re neither.
People also saw it as a marketing trick or self-promotion of a faceless company - we often review our own films, products, clothes; we shoot everything with Südwegen cameras, lenses, film and write on Snowbooks and such, but we’ve had issues shot on Polaroids (remember Instant Snow?) and issues that were completely handwritten and even then we were accused of creating a cult of personality around some of our staff members.
This is not a denial, apology or defense of what we were doing, because we continue doing that to this day. And people love Burgrave. And we love Burgrave too.
The company Südwegen is the child, nay, the survivor, of many broken up companies, failures, bankruptcies, acquisitions, forced mergers and corporate wars, so many companies that will be forgotten, leaving nothing behind. Burgrave is the history book of all this. It is the success story. It is in the wasteland of corporate nightmares an oasis of dreams.
And so we will continue writing and printing our magazine as a testament of our survival.
Mortal Football was a game that was in development by one of our sister companies, Adari Studios, many years ago.
The game, fully playable now, was never released for legal reasons. When that company was broken up, we hired all the staff and took the game assets.
We had no interest in continuing a long, expensive league journey to release the game, nor did we want to skin it and release it as a PC game, but there were many small things in the game that we wanted.
We took the game to the development junkyard not to trash, but to strip it for pieces. You cannot imagine how many Südwegen games have pieces of Mortal Football in them, not just Dribble and Total Street Football, but Shred, Rúní and so many more.
But that doesn’t mean Mortal Football is gone. We host regular parties where you could play the game with other Südies.
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