Okay, so I haven't made any blog posts here in more than two weeks. (Which isn't necessarily unusual given that last year I often went a couple of weeks between posts, and before that my posts were sporadic at best, but contrasts with the flurry of daily blog posts late December just before the hard launch, I guess.) So what have I been up to in that time, and, more pertinent to the site on which this blog post is appearing, have I made any progress on the Wongery?

Well, in the interests of eschewing my usual practice burying the lede beyond multiple paragraphs of irrelevant rambling, let me say the main thing I wanted to say in this post up front. After far too long, I finally got a new article up. Technically, in fact, there are two new articles. Actually, you could even say that technically there are twenty-eight new articles, but most of them don't count.

But before I elaborate on the new articles (and I will)... surely those articles didn't take me almost two weeks to write. What else has been taking up my time?

(Multiple paragraphs of irrelevant rambling commence now.)

Well, three things, mainly. And one of the three does have to do with the Wongery. Now that the Gamespace is finally implemented... I want to have content there. And to put up content for the games I want to include, I need to have a firm understanding of the rules for the games. And to do that... I have to read through the rulebooks. I mentioned previously that two of the games in question (Basic Roleplaying and Pathfinder) had released new editions since I'd last read their rulebooks, and there was a third (Savage Worlds) that I'd never actually owned, so I bought copies of all three games in December and have been reading through them when I can find the time. Along with the Year Zero Engine, which had also had an updated version of its SRD released since I last read it, but that one's less than fifty pages long so it's not as much of an issue. And EABA, which I'd actually owned for years and in which I was very interested but which I'd, uh, somehow never previously got around to actually reading all the way through.

Yes, that means that of the seven RPGs I included in the RPG space at launch, of only two of them had I fully read through the most recent edition of the rules. So why did I pick those RPGs and not others I was already more up-to-date with? I may be am stupid.

Anyway, it's slow going because I'm not an especially fast reader, and RPG rulebooks tend to be dense, especially since of course I don't want to just skim them and get the gist; I want to make sure I really understand the rules and concepts, which often means flipping back to previous sections and rereading bits. (Technically, I probably don't need to read through the entire rulebooks; I could probably get away with reading the core rules and skipping some parts that aren't necessarily relevant to what I'm doing—like the invariably tedious equipment lists, which are always a slog and generally about my least favorite part of almost any RPG rulebook. (Well, maybe the combat chapters give them a run for their money.) But I'm a completionist and want to try to do things right, so I'm reading all the books cover-to-cover.) So that's taken up a lot of time, but I do want to get it done, because, again, I do very much want to start actually putting content in the Gamespace. I finished reading through the new version of the Year Zero SRD (though again that was less than fifty pages, so not a huge deal), and I'm almost done with Savage Worlds and BRP (in the case of the former, I've read the Core Rules and the World Builder Guide, but also want to read the (48-page) Mini Settings book to get a better feel for how Savage Worlds settings are presented), so that will just leave just Pathfinder and EABA to go (both of which I've been reading through, but I'm not finished yet).

(Oh yes, related, I've also made a little more progress on the Lua Udemy course which I'm taking so I can use Lua to write Templates for the Wongery Gamespace. But honestly I haven't been spending much time on that the last couple of weeks, so it wasn't one of the three things I had in mind to list.)

Second, well, as I mentioned in the last post, my singleminded focus on the Wongery the end of last year (or as singleminded as my executive dysfunction allows me to be, anyway) meant that I neglected other projects I had to do, and one of those in particular is severely overdue and I've been scrambling to finally finish it. So that's taken up a lot of time I'd rather have spent on the Wongery.

And third, uh, still stressing out about finances, I guess. Last year was a difficult one for the industry I work in, and my work is always slow if not nonexistent over the holidays, but I did pull in just enough in December not only to pay my January rent but to buy the aforementioned RPG rulebooks and to pay for an upgraded webhosting plan. (Speaking of which, it's been a long time since I've heard anything about the site migration that was supposed to be going on, and, uh... I should check on that. Which means, yes, it's possible the site may go down for a couple of days in the next week or two while it's moved to the new host, since that's something that apparently still hasn't happened yet for some reason.) But maybe I shouldn't have spent money on all those things, because it didn't really leave me with any savings, and I've had very little money come in so far this year. I mentioned before there was a company that I frequently work for that as of late December owed me more than four thousand dollars and hadn't paid me since November; they did (as I mentioned in a later post) come through with most of that money just before the holidays, but they haven't paid me since, and they currently owe me not as much as before, but still more than two thousand dollars. And I would have been making some good money this past week, except that at least four different jobs cancelled or postponed at the last minute because of weather. So... yeah; I'm once again in a pretty dire financial scrape. Again, in the long term I should be fine; I do expect that company that owes me over two thousand dollars will pay me by the end of the month, and the jobs that I was supposed to be working this last week I probably will end up working eventually, and while that won't come in time to prevent me from being hit with several late fees it shouldn't put me late enough on any payments to actually damage my credit rating. (Not that my credit rating is anything to write home about, but that's mostly due to high debt, and it will improve as I pay down my credit cards and loans; I don't have any recent missed payments, which would be a much less fixable issue.) Still, even if I'm not (that) worried about my finances in the long term, I still don't have any money right now, and I don't know exactly when I'm going to have money, and I have bills piling up, and that's a taxing situation to be in.

I'm sorry. You almost certainly didn't want to read about my bemoaning my financial status. I'll end the irrelevant rambling now and get back to what was supposed to be the main point of this post, viz., the new articles.

I'm not going to make a blog post about every time we post a new article, especially since my hope is that we'll be posting new articles a lot more often than we have been. Which admittedly is a low bar to clear, because previously the last new article we posted (not counting stubs was, uh... back in September. Yikes. Which is, of course, why I'm posting now about having just finally posted another new article; it's been long enough since the last one that it's I guess sort of a newsworthy, or blogworthy, event. To be fair, of course, I have been working a lot on the Wongery lately, especially in late December, but I've been doing things other than writing new mainspace articles. I implemented the new namespaces; I redesigned the site; I added the Metawongery and wrote some sorely needed projectspace articles. But really, the core of the Wongery, it's raison d'être, was always supposed to be the mainspace articles of the Central Wongery, the articles about imaginary worlds. So I figured it was long past time I finally got more articles up.

(I will, however, probably make posts on social media (Tumblr, Mastodon, Cohost) every time we post a new article. Excepting, of course, stubs, disambiguation pages, and other "unlisted" pages.)

So. I have just put up a new article on Djarvin, a nation on the world of Curcalen. I've mentioned before that for each world described in the Central Wongery I was planning to choose one main area to primarily focus on, and for Curcalen that's Djarvin; this is the area I intend to develop in the most detail in the future, though there will of course still be articles about other parts of Curcalen as well.

The information on the world of Curcalen itself, however, remains rather scant; the main article on the entire world of Curcalen is less than one fifth the length of the new article about Djarvin, and missing a lot of important information... among other things, there's very little there about its geography (there is one brief paragraph, but it doesn't even name any of the continents); there's nothing at all about what creatures live there; there's no information about its calendar, or its history... In short, there's really not much there, and certainly not enough to actually do anything with the world. This was one of the first articles we posted (to be exact, it was the twenty-fourth mainspace article we posted), and we were writing much shorter, less in-depth articles back then. We do intend to go back and expand those old articles, and we have in fact been doing that... we just haven't got to the Curcalen article yet. It's coming, though; expect a much longer and more detailed article about Curcalen in the hopefully not too distant future.

Which brings us to the second new article. As I said, we've been going back and editing and expanding the old articles, and while we haven't got to Curcalen yet, I did just tackle the article on rews—the disk-shaped worlds found in the plane of Charos. Except that as I was rewriting the article, it occurred to me that it would make more sense as two articles. Charos does not, after all, necessarily have to be the only place where disk-shaped worlds are found, and it made sense (well, to me at least) to use "rew" as a general term for such worlds. But in that case, the rews of Charos had enough distinctive features that they merited their own article as well. So, in addition to rewriting the "rew" article and making it about rews in general, I also added a new article, "rew (Charos)", specifically about the rews of that plane. (And then I had to go through and change most of the links to "rew" to more appropriate links to "rew (Charos)", which was a bit of a hassle, but oh well.) Combined, the rewritten "rew" and the new "rew (Charos)" articles are more than ten times the length of the old "rew" article, so this is a significant expansion.

So the Curcalen article will eventually undergo a similar expansion. Not just yet, because we're mostly rewriting those old articles in the same order they were originally written, and there still fifteen articles between "rew" and "Curcalen"; the next few old articles slated to be rewritten and expanded are spacemist, ganulia, and dream magic. But we'll get to Curcalen... hopefully pretty soon.

But anyway! Again, prior to this we hadn't added any new (non-stub) articles since September, so it's good to finally get something up! And I'm going to try to make sure there are new articles going up a lot more often in the future. (Which again is a very low bar to clear.)

Oh, there's one other thing I've been doing as I posted the new articles that I hadn't been doing in the past. As I mentioned in another past news post, a poster on the forum recommended that I make stub articles for redlinks to undefined terms, and they had a point, so I'd been trying to do that, at least to some degree. As I post a new article, or a significant rewrite and expansion of an old article, I've been going through and making stub articles for any redlinks that I think particularly need them. I haven't been doing that for every redlink in the articles; making a stub article of course takes up a lot less time than writing a full-length article, but it still does take some time, and my time isn't unlimited. So I haven't been making stub articles for real-world topics for which there's information available elsewhere, or for redlinks where there are enough context clues that it's clear what they're generally referring to. But for any redlinks that would otherwise be completely unexplained, I've been making stub articles for them. That's where the other twenty-six new articles referred to in the last sentence of the second paragraph come in—they're stub articles for redlinks in the new (or newly rewritten) articles, from anthropic complex to urippu.

(One reason I had been reluctant to write stub articles previously is that I didn't want them showing up when a random article was selected, but now that I have an extension to prevent that from happening, that's no longer a concern. There is, however, one remaining disadvantage of the stub articles. I'd been consulting the Wanted Pages special page to see what redlinked articles have the most links to them, and using that information to prioritize which of them to write first. But I also want to eventually replace (some of) the stub articles with full-length articles, and there's no easy way to tell which of them have the most links to them—the Wanted Pages page, of course, only shows linked articles that don't exist; it doesn't show stubs. Still, there's a way around this; what I can do is write another extension to make the Wanted Articles list include stubs... or rather, to have a checkbox there that gives the option of including stubs. And yeah, that's something I intend to do eventually. But it's not a really high priority.)

Oh... there's another issue, though, in that some of the redlinks aren't so much to articles that don't exist, but exist under different names, because I've changed the term for the concept and used the new term in more recent articles haven't changed the name of the article yet. Or, in some case, there are links actually going to the wrong article for similar reasons. The best example of this is probably "folk". In the beginning, I followed the lead of most role-playing games in referring to various ellogous species as "races". But, well, this term has some connotations and some history behind it that make it... less than ideal to use for this, so I eventually settled on using "folks" instead. But I haven't changed the title of the old "race" article to "folk" yet, because I figured well, it was due for a rewrite anyway, and I'd just change it then. Which means current links to "folk" don't link there, but they also don't show up as redlinks, because I'd previously made "folk" a redirect to "Fair Folk", which... it now shouldn't be. For that matter, "Fair Folk" shouldn't really go where it goes now either, because it goes to a specific hacker organization of the Eversky and of course "fair folk" is a fairly common and widespread term for fairies. So yeah... at some point I should probably move the "Fair Folk" article to "Fair Folk (Eversky)", make "Fair Folk" either a redirect to "fairy" (even though that doesn't currently exist) or a disambiguation page, and move the page currently at "race" to "folk". And really... given the number of pages that link to "folk", and the problematic nature of the term "race", that last one in particular I really ought to prioritize. Hm. Okay, yeah, I should probably do that in the near future, even if I don't get around to doing a full rewrite of the article.

But anyway, I do hope to start getting articles up a lot more frequently in the future—though, again, that's a very low bar to clear. But there's other work I've still got to get done on the Wongery too. Some of it I've already mentioned—I have to check on the site migration; I have to finish reading those rulebooks and get some content up on the RPG gamespace. Speaking of which, to get the statblocks on the RPG gamespace to look right, I want to create another custom extension that will allow different namespaces to have their own associated CSS. But of course there's more. I still have to modify the subspace tabs extension so if there are too many tabs some show up in a dropdown, and also so there's an extra tab with a plus sign to create new subspace tabs. Also, speaking of extensions, I discovered a vexing bug in an old one; it turns out that a couple weeks ago when I fixed the subspace extension so that links to pages in the subspaces didn't show up as broken even when the page existed, somehow that made it so now Interwiki links all show up as broken, which, uh... yeah, okay, that's something I definitely want to fix. Whoops. Oh, and of course there are other subspaces besides the RPG space that also need content. I ought to finish that onirarch-themed Clash of Champions deck I'm working on for the Strike Engine, and I have some LEGO models I need to put up in the Buildspace, and so on and so on...

But! While I do have all those other things I want to get done, plus of course all the non-Wongery-related things I also need to do for work and other reasons, I do intend to make more time for actually writing articles. That's the main thing the Wongery is supposed to be about, and I want to have it a lot more content. So... I hope within the next week to finally get some content up in the RPG space, and/or finally get that Clash of Champions deck up in the CCG space, and hopefully fix that bug with the Interwiki links and see the site migration through, too. But in addition to all that, I do intend to get more articles up. Sure, there are other things I also want to get done, but that's a very basic part of the Wongery that I really don't want to neglect (or don't want to continue neglecting).