Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

21/Mar/2013

First Kiss

Our pets always died. We ran out of room in our own garden so I sneaked into the neighbours’. I dug carefully and put the grass back the way it was; I became adept at handling shovels. Extremely adept. So when Mariot – who never called me – called me, I knew what it was about. She told me where to meet her.

Someone got a gravelly grave. I hadn’t recognized his face. I saved the place on my phone, as an X in a geotagged tweet in the drafts folder, and told Mariot she owed me. She gave me a kiss.

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21/Mar/2013

Announcement and Advisories

Short version: daily flash fiction! Trigger Policy updated! Read things what aren’t my writings also!

Hello! I’m Johannes Punkt and you may know me from such PR stunts as travelling into your dreams and releasing spiders all over the place! Haha, who am I kidding, that’s a thing that starts tonight. Starting today, I will resume a thing I hiatused almost a year ago with the Day of a Whole Lot of Drabbles (2012/06/28/the-day-of-a-whole-lot-of-drabbles/). That is right, I will post drabbles (self-contained 100-word flash stories), once a day, for at least a few months. The first of these will go up in about six hours if my calculations are correct.

I have updated the Trigger Policy page. It is now different from before, in light of the change of pace and content of this blog. You can read the whole thing at /triggers/

I have made the decision to not put any warnings, trigger or otherwise, to the daily drabbles that appear on this blog. Please be aware that anything that shows up might be upsetting and proceed with caution. It is impossible for me to warn adequately as triggers are often too specific for a generalized warning to be useful.

The bigger posts like the conlanging and technobabbling will be less common now, perhaps one every three or four weeks, or when inspiration strikes. I will try to review a book again and maybe make that a thing; that was fun.

Lastly, I will mention some serials I am enjoying at the moment. In order of the installations’ length.

The Ritual is like a treasure hunt that is currently most likely to turn you into a dead wooden statue that always stares and never blinks. mercerbox.wordpress.com/tag/the-ritual/

The First 500 is like a few details of a huge painting being filled in slot by slot like a meandering snake, and the brushstrokes are wide and the details are fine. alastairjrball.blogspot.co.uk/p/the-first-500.html

Berlin Confidential is always on my list of recommended reading because damn why is this not a big thing yet? It has mysterious murders, tension, myriad and well-defined characters, angst, gay sex, and Weimar Berlin. AND MORE. I can never sum it up. Just go read it. berlinconfidential.tumblr.com/story

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18/Mar/2013

Methods and Morphology of Conlanging

This is a post on conlanging.

It details 3 methods of constructing a language more or less from scratch – that is, not basing it off already existing languages. There are surely other ways to do conlangs but these are the ones that have occured to me/the people I conlang with. Let’s give the methods the arbitrary names clusterfuck, evolutionary, and interpretive.

Clusterfuck

…is the approach taken with the Cekno’s language; all ideas and jumbledness, like a brainstorming session that doesn’t really end. It goes a bit unwieldy after a few months of working like that, apparently. This involves a lot of jumping back and forth between different topics. You can do it more or less structurally but it is the most chaotic method nonetheless.

In trying to create the Cekno Idiosyncrasy, we tried to think like the star and figure out what kind of stuff it would think up, and it got confusing. Rather alien, but … yeah.

Evolutionary

…is when you try to create a language by making up the culture that goes along with it, maybe following its route from some imaginary savannah period to living in tents and placing religious importance on testicles. The way I considered doing this was to take a tribal society and mark out the concepts important to them, define some semantic clusters, and then add more stuff in hundred-year-leaps. This’d include some sound shift and imaginary politics.

Interpretive
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14/Mar/2013

Plague

The plan is simple. Wait for the storm and then fly the supplies dirigible over the enemy city, apparently lost. The grey storm will make it impossible to see from inside the dirigible, so you have to rely on magnetism. As will the enemy. If they don’t shoot you down you just walk into the balloon and fire a few rounds yourself.

You won’t make it out of there alive. You will be captured or killed. If they somehow have the sense not to use the supplies, at least make sure they don’t sever your heads when they kill you.

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11/Mar/2013

Mycomancy and Big Heists (Marla Mason #4 Review)

[Spoiler Warning]

I found this book in a little bookshop in Hay-on-Wye, a receptionless town in Wales that is basically just one huge bookshop. If you’re ever in Wales you should visit it. Even the coffee shops sell books.

Anyway, this book is by one T. A. Pratt and it is called Spell Games. Judging by the price in American or Canadian dollars on the back, and the fact I’ve never seen any of the author’s other books anywhere, I’d say the books have never really been marketed in Europe.

This is what the cover looks like. All the cards except the tarot Death cards are the ace of spades. Death isn’t a bad card per se in tarot, the way I understand it – it’s more like ‘change’. Presumably the ‘Change’ card is TERRIBLE for you.

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7/Mar/2013

Voyage

“Find life.”

You were fitted with a chelonian, deliberate kind of intelligence, and all the cameras in the world. You left our system as a living thing; you taught us all we know about extrasolar space. And you fulfilled your mission; you found life.

You aimed your thruster; you set your course.

And you degraded. Micrometeors, particles of dust, stray gamma bursts, bugs that turned up after hundreds of years, data inconsistencies. So you turned into just another inert clump of metal, gathering ice on your journey to this other world. They did not see you coming.

And you crashed.

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4/Mar/2013

I Solve Your Fictional Problems with FTL-Drives

The post on Time Travel was a success! On account of how everybody loves technobabble, I will strive to make solving your fictional problems a regular occurence. Today’s letter comes from one @_TK_O (Ms. Osborne), who writes

Dear Mr Punkt,

My starship is not peppy enough, and I’m struggling to get it to go faster than light. However, all the fancy spaceships my friends own seem to be able to manage it! Tell me, how can I win the next big drag race in the Alpha Quadrant?

Sincerely,

Ms. Osborne, T. Read the rest of this entry »

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28/Feb/2013

Stearin

That boy always had a lighter on him.

They would always do it in his bedroom; never hers. Every time before he backed onto the bed and fell backwards, all tousled hair and coy grin, he would light the one thick white candle by the window like a sacred ritual. It would go out by itself when they lay there, spent and giggly and warm, and he called it theirs.

When it was a stump of just one inch she asked what he would do when it burnt down.

“I’d get a new one,” he said, with a sad smile.

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25/Feb/2013

More on Conlanging

The language of the Cekno has evolved! (See /2012/12/14/thoughts-on-conlanging/ for context.)

With the help of @kerastion (Rob Mitchelmore), @drakekin, and @eleniturner (Lily Newman), the language is going places and it is exciting.

Prototype of what the language would look like, by @drakekin. Isn’t it pretty?

It still is not anything you can communicate with, but it has ideas! There is a Glossary of Definitions you can check out: /glossary/idiosyncratic-glossary/. You can also check out drakekin’s work at his ministry-of-plenty.co.uk/, or his version of the glossary (with glyphs!) here: …pages/a-cekno-dictionary.html.

Some cool words from it are the word for light or photons, which I aim to make as diverse and difficult as the Greek λόγος (logos), or the Latin re. One can dream, right? Also the word for waiting, without knowing something is going to happen. It is almost always a retroactive verb, for saying things like ‘I waited for the reaper to come (having never heard of the reaper before he came)’ where the bracketed part is only implied. Can be used in present-tense if one is very careful.

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21/Feb/2013

Yes

Semaphore towers fell; cables were cut; spy satellites blacking out all over the globe. White noise; telephones were scrambled mid-call – I was interrupted mid-sentence. There were a few shouts, a few wordless moans. And language broke down. Words mitosed into smaller words, and sounds into their constituents until just one syllable was left. This syllable was prolonged and tested and broken, it split itself into the muscle contractions and relaxations, in tongue and throat and lungs and diaphragm, and they were repeated over and over again, every time you touched me in a new place, or in a new way.

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