Better things to think about
Dec. 15th, 2011 07:36 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI dreamed that a superhero archer showed an interest and had grand plans for me but on closer inspection they were the same usual plans that leave out all the useful parts. So then I spent the rest of the dream explaining All About My Disability. There was a speech. It started out being about how you can't just come out about being disabled, because no matter how out you think you are, the default assumption of the world is still set the other way, which is pretty much why x is a disability in the first place, since the world isn't set up to make it worky. So, with each and every person, there comes a point where you either have to come out or know they don't know you. And while there's some things where you could just let it slide and try to pass, some plans go smash right into the realm of cannot and out of spoons error, and then suddenly you have to, and you don't know how they'll look at you afterwards. Great big speech. Woke up in an utterly foul mood, convinced nothing will ever work ever again.
I know I said I wanted awake to be better than asleep, but that wasn't quite the way around I had in mind.
So. Sod all that.
I been working on my other planet. The one the stone circles lead to. I reckoned they'd be smaller and more advanced in biotechnology. So, for why? I decided the planet they're living on lacks fossil fuels and most easily mined mineral deposits. Like, you can't just go dig for iron and get reasonable amounts of iron. It's always going to be difficult to get together. So the iron biology needs is going to be top priority iron, and you can't just have chunks of it scattered around being chairs or something. They might have free gold, maybe other stuff we'd consider super precious, just because pretty. But they're going to be massively impressed with our biologically necessary minerals. Trade gets really simple that way around. So, big empty planet, no convenient places to dig for energy or metal, tech has to take a different path. Plus the first settlers there were terraformers. So they were set up to think in the long term, to think in terms of making a place suitable for life, and, to a certain extent, of making life suitable for the place. They think in integrated ecological systems. They're going to be massively unimpressed with what we've done to our biosphere. They're small because it's more efficient, and because limited resources don't make for maximum possible growth. They're perfectly healthy to be going on with, but they're not spending biological resources on just having longer levers in their limbs or something. They can grow levers. They can grow most things, given time. There were people growing bridges on a BBC nature documentary, that's a good start on the mindset this lot will have. Sure it'll take a couple of generations to get something useful grown, but after that it'll last a few centuries, and everyone knows how useful it will be, so they keep working on it. But they aren't a people without urgency. They work crops and raise animals, biology has plenty of built in urgency.
I can't decide if their messenger technology should be purely biotech too. Do they have electricity at all? Would they understand about radio? How high tech do I want their biotech to be? Something that will sustain a civ we recognise as equal to out own, only different. Could messenger pigeons really be part of that? Well super pigeons that can cross the continent in a day could do a lot of good messaging.
They have photographs and film and microfilm. Where do they get the light from to illuminate them? Do they still burn things or did they develop solar power to imitate their favourite foliage? And do they have any equivalent of the internet?
I decided language goes in a pill. Because there's only so much story you can get out of the early stages of translation, and you can always have mistranslation stories. But I was thinking, I'd like to play with accents. This only works as properly acted stuff, it's no fun on paper, you can't write an accent. You can write different lexis and logically any Trade language in a pill would have a different set of words available, and a limited set. You'd end up having to talk around things to get your Trade words to work right. But, if you have actors and speaking, I'd like to play with accents, so instead of having a conlang to be the Trade, they just all switch to speaking in the linguist's accent. Like, there's people from every region of Britain there, all this variety of accent, but the linguist did all the work developing the pill, so when the Trade gets talked, all the new planet people talk with his accent. Only to show that everyone who took a pill is also talking Trade, they all talk with his accent too. It's like the bit in Doctor Who where Amy and Vincent have the same accent so they must be from the same place. Only longer lasting and probably not actually funny. The linguist's accent would have to be one that's invisible most of the time. Like, I'm tempted to make it very RP, or posh English, but posh isn't quite the same as culturally dominant. So he'd sound like middle class English, and it would only sound odd when everyone else switched out of their regional accents to sound that way too.
Right. Useless worldbuilding over for the day. Breakfast, then studying.
Three hour exam. Arrgh arrrgh arrgh.
I know I said I wanted awake to be better than asleep, but that wasn't quite the way around I had in mind.
So. Sod all that.
I been working on my other planet. The one the stone circles lead to. I reckoned they'd be smaller and more advanced in biotechnology. So, for why? I decided the planet they're living on lacks fossil fuels and most easily mined mineral deposits. Like, you can't just go dig for iron and get reasonable amounts of iron. It's always going to be difficult to get together. So the iron biology needs is going to be top priority iron, and you can't just have chunks of it scattered around being chairs or something. They might have free gold, maybe other stuff we'd consider super precious, just because pretty. But they're going to be massively impressed with our biologically necessary minerals. Trade gets really simple that way around. So, big empty planet, no convenient places to dig for energy or metal, tech has to take a different path. Plus the first settlers there were terraformers. So they were set up to think in the long term, to think in terms of making a place suitable for life, and, to a certain extent, of making life suitable for the place. They think in integrated ecological systems. They're going to be massively unimpressed with what we've done to our biosphere. They're small because it's more efficient, and because limited resources don't make for maximum possible growth. They're perfectly healthy to be going on with, but they're not spending biological resources on just having longer levers in their limbs or something. They can grow levers. They can grow most things, given time. There were people growing bridges on a BBC nature documentary, that's a good start on the mindset this lot will have. Sure it'll take a couple of generations to get something useful grown, but after that it'll last a few centuries, and everyone knows how useful it will be, so they keep working on it. But they aren't a people without urgency. They work crops and raise animals, biology has plenty of built in urgency.
I can't decide if their messenger technology should be purely biotech too. Do they have electricity at all? Would they understand about radio? How high tech do I want their biotech to be? Something that will sustain a civ we recognise as equal to out own, only different. Could messenger pigeons really be part of that? Well super pigeons that can cross the continent in a day could do a lot of good messaging.
They have photographs and film and microfilm. Where do they get the light from to illuminate them? Do they still burn things or did they develop solar power to imitate their favourite foliage? And do they have any equivalent of the internet?
I decided language goes in a pill. Because there's only so much story you can get out of the early stages of translation, and you can always have mistranslation stories. But I was thinking, I'd like to play with accents. This only works as properly acted stuff, it's no fun on paper, you can't write an accent. You can write different lexis and logically any Trade language in a pill would have a different set of words available, and a limited set. You'd end up having to talk around things to get your Trade words to work right. But, if you have actors and speaking, I'd like to play with accents, so instead of having a conlang to be the Trade, they just all switch to speaking in the linguist's accent. Like, there's people from every region of Britain there, all this variety of accent, but the linguist did all the work developing the pill, so when the Trade gets talked, all the new planet people talk with his accent. Only to show that everyone who took a pill is also talking Trade, they all talk with his accent too. It's like the bit in Doctor Who where Amy and Vincent have the same accent so they must be from the same place. Only longer lasting and probably not actually funny. The linguist's accent would have to be one that's invisible most of the time. Like, I'm tempted to make it very RP, or posh English, but posh isn't quite the same as culturally dominant. So he'd sound like middle class English, and it would only sound odd when everyone else switched out of their regional accents to sound that way too.
Right. Useless worldbuilding over for the day. Breakfast, then studying.
Three hour exam. Arrgh arrrgh arrgh.