-
Uncategorized
More on the story engine
I started working up the story engine last night in Ruby. Greg suggested that XSLT would be perfect for it if I stored my stories as XML. Do a simple transformation, and voila, a story in XHTML with layout and everything. I was hoping I could knock it out in a single evening. Turns out Ruby and XSLT are two more separate critters than I thought — there’s no default library to handle it, and the three or so available are older and lack documentation. Better yet, the one easily available as a gem doesn’t use Ruby’s nice REXML, it uses LibXML. Combine all that with never having used XSLT…
-
Uncategorized
Story engine
I’ve always loved the simplicity and pleasantness of whatever must be under the hood of Elf’s stories — he seems to have easy management of story arcs, multiple sortings of stories, multiples sets of stories, next and previous buttons within stories, etc. I’m debating how I want to build my own little story engine. Right now, my stories are in WordPress, published as page. One avenue I could take would be to write a WordPress plugin to allow me to manage stories the way I want — keep them as pages, but add the fluff I want. Another avenue would be to roll my own — make a separate little…
-
“Special needs” posted
It’s been a couple of weeks, thanks to the Tampa trip and the move, but I have a new Transhuman Congress story done: “Special needs“. The Meta in the office gave no acknowledgment of Miriam or Donna, but walked lightly to the door to Ser Harold’s office, opened it, and went in. Donna’s theatrical shudder drew Miriam’s attention back to her. “I’ll tell you, I don’t mind them, of course,” she said, eyes wide, “but I do wish they were polite and would ask to see Ser Harold like anyone else.” “Don’t be silly. Politeness is a culturally-defined term,” Miriam muttered. She wanted to talk to that Meta.
-
“Art and Soul” posted
Based loosely on a local art festival I attended a couple of weekends ago (also called Art and Soul), I’ve written “Art and Soul“, a little short about… courage? It was full of limbs. Some with pseudoflesh, some shiny or dull metal, some more plastic-like materials. And all were decorated intricately. The metals were engraved with tight, swirling patterns covering most of the surface, and the pseudofleshes were scarred in similar patterns, as if the wearer had been burned or cut very, very carefully. No wonder people were giving it a wide berth. It falls within my newfangled Transhuman Congress ‘verse.
-
“Reshaping the landscape” posted
I wrote a piece of flash fiction last week called “Reshaping the Landscape” that I’ve published here at irrsinn.net tonight: “Flat landscapes for better visibility,” they claimed. “Safer all around,” they claimed. Bullshit. “It’s my landscape!” she shouted down behind her. “You can’t have it!” Writing this has spawned a whole set of ideas in this same ‘verse. A lot of the ideas concern what a “person” is, what essential rights people have, how subjugated people make their own culture and identity, etc. especially as pertains to artificial intelligence. I also want to use this to experiment with letting a universe emerge from a set of short/flash stories (as opposed…