Welcome to the Wongery!
The Wongery is a site for information about imaginary worlds. The
core features of the Wongery are the
Central Wongery, a wiki with content created by
the site's owners, and the Public Wongery,
where anyone can post their creations. All of the main content of
these wikis is released under an open license, so anyone can use it
for their own works, subject to the license's conditions.
Furthermore, aside from the description of the world, there are pages
devoted to additional applications, including RPG statistics, LEGO
models, and more.
If you're new here, feel free to browse the Central
Wongery or the Public Wongery, check out
the forum, or read the blog
to see a bit of the site's history.
(Yes, we know the site could really use some illustrations, among other things. The Wongery
is still very much a work in progress.)
So, a lot of people really hate generative "AI", and I am okay with that because I am one of those people. In fact, I think more people should hate generative "AI". I've gone on at length about the reasons for this in a previous blog post, so I won't explain them again in detail here, but very briefly: even aside from questions about quality and intellectual property issues, generative "AI" is terrible for the environment, it's terrible for the economy, and the only reason it's being pushed so hard and shoved into everything is to give the tech industry an illusionary paradigm shift it can pretend to be working toward and to further line the pockets of billionaires.
And some people who really hate generative "AI" like to call out and decry "AI"-generated content when they see it, which I guess I would be okay with in principle, except that it seems a lot of those people are much less skilled...
I've mentioned before in a few blog posts a sort of worldbuilding game, or coöperative worldbuilding project, I got involved with that was taking place on
Discord (and which I keep saying one day I'll make a blog post about, which I still haven't done). What I don't think I mentioned before is that the project actually got its start on Reddit, in a post on the r/worldbuilding subreddit... and that that post was later deleted by the subreddit moderators, for supposedly violating the following rule:
Worldbuilding exercises or games that do not promote substantive discussion are not in line with our community's focus. For example, worldbuilding exercises must not encourage users to create small, insignificant content on the fly, or serve as impromptu collaboration projects.
Which struck me as... a bit odd, given that the post already...
I've previously lamented in this blog my complete lack of artistic ability. Several times, in fact. I wish I oculd create illustration of the creatures and concepts described in the Wongery, that I could portray them as I envision tham and make eyecatching visuals to bring attention to my work, but unfortunately I am terrible at drawing. As I've said before, it's not for want of practice; I've loved to draw since I was a child, and I spent a lot of time on it, but while I suppose my artistic skills have improved somewhat, they're still not anywhere near what I'd consider remotely passable.
But the fact that I am bad at something does not stop me from trying to do it anyway. If it did, I guess I'd never do anything. And while I doubt I'll ever consider my art good enough to make illustrations for the Central Wongery mainspace, I'm still going to try and make art for some of the subspaces I'm less picky about, if only because I don't have the money to pay real artists to...
