Five Foundations Of Worldbuilding As a writer of fantasy and science fiction, I’m often asked for my tips on world-building. Earlier in 2012, I taught a workshop on it at my local library, and all year I’ve been meaning to put those notes online. Finally I have time to do it! So, here are my thoughts on world-building, with examples for you to investigate on your own. In the Beginning … If you look online or in books about writing fantasy, you often find lengthy lists of questions to ask yourself about the world you’re creating. My hand-drawn map of Ash’s world A lot of these world building guides also suggest that you draw a map of your fictional world. Of course, it is important to spend some time on world building, especially if you’re writing a story set in a secondary world.2 But I don’t think you need to get bogged down in answering 100 questions about the economics and politics and plant life of your world. Five Foundations of World Building Who has it? The ritual of the Sorting Hat The ritual of the Reaping Ramen!
A Map of San Francisco, After a Catastrophic Rise in Sea Levels Far in the future, San Francisco's Divisadero Street is a cruise-ship harbor, taco trucks have become taco boats, and the Mission District is a beloved site for scuba diving. That's the waterlogged vision of cartographer Brian Stokle and Bay Area blog Burrito Justice, who've made a fantasy map of the city post-200 feet of sea-level rise. The map, though it's been around a while, is getting its wonky due in a new urban-cartography exhibit at local urban-planning think tank SPUR. (The show runs until February 6.) Regarding its inspiration, the entity behind Burrito Justice says via Twitter: "Brian made a topo map, I was joking around, wanted to know when Potrero & Bernal became islands. 200 feet is where things got interesting." There's a fake NIMBY group, the Submerged Historic San Francisco Preservation Association, that rails against high-rise development with the battle cry, "Old San Francisco is still alive in our hearts and minds, even if only the tops of the buildings can be seen!
Alternese (JBR Uchronlang) Justin B Rye 01-Dec-13 PROLOG Myriad Forking Tongues What would English be like if 1066 hadn't happened? I don't mean that in the freakish calendric anomaly sense, obviously; I mean it in the ordinary sense of allohistorical linguistics. The answer is that eliminating the Battle of Hastings might make less of a systematic difference than you'd imagine, except to the spelling (which admittedly is enough to make the language look thoroughly foreign). However, that doesn't tell us anything about the importance of this one allohistorical hinge-point, since much the same would be true in any ATL of similar age, such as the one where William I died in 1067 and left his followers to squabble over the kingdom. (This one's been done before, but usually badly. VURWORD Present Conditional Before I start I'm going to need to give a bit of linguistic background. (If you're wondering where the brackets are, sorry: it'll be because your browser doesn't support CSS…) MAP I Outlook Changeable
Manospondylus Earthshapes In their 1981 book Facts and Fallacies, Chris Morgan and David Langford note that the biblical reference to the “four corners of the earth” would apply equally well if the world were a tetrahedron. In a similar spirit, as American airman Joseph Portney was flying over the North Pole in 1968 he wondered, “What if the Earth were … ?” He made sketches of 12 fanciful alternate Earths and gave them to Litton’s Guidance & Control Systems graphic arts group, which created models that were featured in the company’s Pilots and Navigators Calendar of 1969. Portney graduated from the U.S. The Internet Archive has the whole complement.
20 World Building Questions for Authors to ask Themselves Author at work: now is the time to ask yourself these world building questions World building is the art of convincing a reader that a fictitious place exists. What do you do if you don’t know where to start creating that illusion? Well, to get you going, here’s a list of 20 world building questions you can ask yourself to get started. What is the geography like? Don’t fall into the Star Wars Trap of having mono-climate worlds (Tatooine = desert, Hoth = ice, Endor = forest). Why is that city there? Cities happen for reasons. What do people eat? If your world contains fantastical creatures, consider which of them are edible. The first person to discover a creature is either a scientist or an explorer; the second is invariably a cook. If your world is more Earth-like, take a cuisine appropriate to your climate and adapt it to your world. Who or what do they worship? Was your world made by one or more gods? How do they express that worship? Are there organized religions? What languages are there?
A Sprawling Videogame City Filled With Buildings Made by Generative Algorithms Game designer Cedric Kerr developed an architectural engine that allows for the rapid creation of buildings to fill out virtual landscapes. Cedric Kerr Kerr only needs to draw an outline of a building and then can stretch it in any dimension while an algorithm populates the form with doors, windows, and other architectural details. All the buildings feature strong right angles which is partly a desire for an oppressive, Brutalist architectural vibe and partially a limit of Kerr's algorithm. Kerr hopes to explore other architectural styles as time permits. In addition to creating unique building, Kerr developed an engine that would automatically populate a landmass with a sprawling city. Dynamically generated elevations are the newest addition to the landscape and could influence gameplay in interesting ways—e.g. missions that require escaping to a mountain hideaway. His goal was to create logical, but not predictable, levels like those found in procedurally generated 2-D games.
American Botanical Council Publishes Revolutionary Analysis Unlocking Mysteries of 500-Year-Old Manuscript Authors Propose Unique New World Origins of Obscure Voynich Manuscript in HerbalGram AUSTIN, Texas, Jan. 20, 2014 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- In the 100th issue of its quarterly, peer-reviewed journal, HerbalGram, the nonprofit American Botanical Council published a feature that may change the course of research on an approximately 500-year-old, illuminated text known as the Voynich Manuscript. Written in a curious language that is yet un-deciphered, the enigma of the Voynich has puzzled scholars and mystery enthusiasts since its 1912 discovery by Polish book collector Wilfrid M. Voynich. (Logo: This manuscript, now housed at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, has elicited enormous interest, resulting in numerous books and Internet sites with no conclusive resolution on the manuscript's origin. HerbalGram's feature article by Arthur O. Dr. "At minimum," Dr. "Dr. SOURCE American Botanical Council
Green Antarctica Thread by @latifnasser on Thread Reader App 5,248 views Last January, I noticed something peculiar in my 2yo’s bedroom that - after a year of obsessive reporting - led me to a profound cosmic revelation about what’s even possible in our universe. A 🧵. So about a year ago, I was putting my little guy to bed in his crib and I noticed a strange detail on the solar system poster up on his wall … Venus had a moon called Zoozve. Put the kid to bed, went back to my room and googled “Does Venus have a moon?” Then I googled “Zoozve” and got no results, literally zero results in English. I called a friend (@lizlandau) who has worked with NASA for a decade and she confirmed: Venus is completely moonless. This started to bug me: why make up a moon on a kids’ poster? So I called the illustrator, a Brit named Alex Foster. Around that time, I got a text from Liz at NASA: “Wait Latif I think I figured it out!!!” It wasn’t ZOOZVE, it was 2002-VE, which is an actual object near Venus. 2002-VE68 (its technical designation) is a giant rock.
Worldbuilding By Map This article was originally written for people building their own worlds for novel writing, but the process is useful for anyone who wants to create a world and draw a map. Let’s get one thing out of the way right now. A map shouldn’t be pretty. I know what you’re thinking – those posters of Middle Earth are gorgeous. Of course a map should be beautiful. So we won’t be needing photoshop today, we need a pad of scratch paper and a pencil. First of all, think about the ‘world’ you need to build. In your tale there will be nations, city states or power centers of some form. Focus on major terrain at this point – how much coastline and mountain ranges. 1. It’s now time to start our map. 2. But circles aren’t really a map. 3. Now let’s lay in some mountains. 4. Next up, we have rivers. Rivers are also strategically important. 5. Add some hills to the edge of your mountain ranges. When you come back, try the following experiment. Once you have a layout you like, we’ll add cities. 6. Related
NUKEMAP by Alex Wellerstein Starting up... You might also try:MISSILEMAP 1. Drag the marker to wherever you'd like to target. Or type in the name of a city: 2. 3. Advanced options: 4. Note that you can drag the target marker after you have detonated the nuke. Created by Alex Wellerstein, 2012-2024. Other options: [?] Interested in nuclear history? DOOMSDAY MACHINESPost-Apocalyptic Road Trips, End of the World-Building, and Interesting Times NUKEMAP's fees and development are sponsored by: Ploughshares Fund Stevens Institute of Technology,School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences Export to Google Earth (KMZ) (beta) No detonations to export! Render objects Advanced display options [+] Debug log: Click anywhere to load visualization Loading...
Szostak Lab: Home We are interested in the chemical and physical processes that facilitated the transition from chemical evolution to biological evolution on the early earth. As a way of exploring these processes, our laboratory is trying to build a synthetic cellular system that undergoes Darwinian evolution. Our view of what such a chemical system would look like centers on a model of a primitive cell, or protocell, that consists of two main components: a self-replicating genetic polymer and a self-replicating membrane boundary. The job of the genetic polymer is to carry information in a way that allows for both replication and variation, so that new sequences that encode useful functions can be inherited and can further evolve. The role of the protocell membrane is to keep these informational polymers localized, so that the functions they encode lead to an advantage in terms of their own replication or survival.