I feel like have started far too many of these blog posts by saying that I haven't been getting as much done on the Wongery as I would like, but that's largely because I haven't been getting as much done on the Wongery as I'd like. Still, I ought to find a different way to open my blog posts. Anyway, I haven't been getting as much done on the Wongery as I would like. Okay, maybe next post I'll come up with a different opening.
I have, however (as I think I've also said in several blog posts), been getting some work done on the Wongery. And in particular, to my immense relief, I just yesterday finally finished and posted an article that took me way too long to get done.
(The article would have been posted slightly earlier, except that there was an issue with the Central Wongery login. I ended up updating the site to the latest version of MediaWiki, but that still didn't entirely solve the problem, which I think ended up stemming from the site's security settings, although I don't know why this just became an issue now and this problem didn't exist all along. Not for the first time I kind of wish that I or one of the other Grandmasters (if any) knew anything about, uh, information technology, or whatever the field is that applies to this sort of thing; honestly I don't even know enough about it to know what to call it.)
The article in question was on "Asia (Gallerra)"—that is to say, the continent of Asia as it exists on Alarcus's (supervillain-dominated) alternate Earth of Gallerra. The article is of course credited to Alarcus, but as I've mentioned before I do at least make an editing pass on all the mainspace articles before they're posted, regardless of who they're credited to, and in this case I decided the article should have a table of all the cressarchies in Asia, including their populations and areas, and this took... a lot of research and calculation (and estimation). (Plus some semi-fancy formularizing in Microsoft Excel to create the wikitext table from a spreadsheet of cressarchies without having to type the damn thing up manually.) I stayed up till five or six in the morning a couple of days working on this article, which is something I definitely should not have done. It's not like it's an urgent matter. I think I just really wanted to get it out of the way. Even so, I'm not sure the numbers in that table are final—especially the populations; I used the real-world populations of the nations occupying that area as a baseline (while doing a little fudging to account for different birthrates and people immigrating or emigrating depending on how uninviting the cressarchy in question was), and while I did take into account in my calculations what proportion of a given country was included in each cressarchy (which means yes, there is a full map of the cressarchies of Asia, but no, it's not really in a suitable state to be posted), I didn't generally take into account where the population was most concentrated; I'll be a bit more careful with populations when it comes to the articles on individual nations.
(Now, am I setting a precedent I may come to regret? When it comes time to write new articles and rewrite the old articles on the continents and pages of other worlds—hmm, I guess Avelax (the westernmost continent of Dadauar) will be the first up for rewrites, and for new articles the next one planned will be Islar on the world of Ijian)—will I have to make similar tables for them, and estimate the area and population of each nation? Hm... I guess I probably should. Okay, yeah, I have a lot of work ahead of me.)
I will say, though, that in doing the research for this article and reading up on the nations in question I've been learning a lot. I feel like I know a lot more about many of the geography and politics of Asia than I did before. I mean, obviously I am still by no means an expert in the subject; I'm just saying I know more about it than I did before, which admittedly may not have been that much.
Part of the reason that it takes me so long to finish Wongery articles is because they often involve a lot of research. I derive words from various languages; I give imaginary creatures taxonomical classifications; I try to quantitatively work out the masses and sizes based on comparison with applicable referents. And... this requires a lot of information that I don't know. I am not, of course, a supergenius polymath with encyclopedic familiarity with every field of human knowledge. I am, if anything, kind of dumb. I have to look a lot of things up.
But I feel that political geography (I am not 100% sure that is the right term for what I mean, but then I seldom am) is kind of a particular weakness of mine. I, uh... don't get around much. I live within fifty kilometers of the town where I grew up. Counting where I live, I've been to a total of five countries and three or four continents. (There's one location I've been to that is considered to be a part of a certain continent in some parts of the world but not in others, hence the hedging on the continent count.) That's not nothing, I guess, but it certainly isn't much.
(I have lately taken to playing daily a little game called Globle, from Trainwreck Labs, that involves guessing a country based on its distance from the countries previously guessed. Predictably, I am bad at it, but then I kind of feel like I'm bad at pretty much everything.)
(So, wait, does this contradict what I said a couple weeks ago about not having played any video games in months? Eh... well, I was thinking of video games that, you know, you install your computer, and that take many hours to play through. Like, to name a few recent major games (that I don't have and am unlikely to play anytime soon, if ever), Baldur's Gate 3 or Elden Ring. I wasn't really thinking of free online educational games I can play on my phone in a few minutes. But if you count that, then sure, I guess by that definition when I said I hadn't played any video games in months I was stating an untruth. Sorry.)
It's not that I wouldn't want to visit other places and experience other cultures. As with a lot of things I haven't done, it comes down to a lack of time and money. If I had the time and money to spare, I'd definitely do much more traveling; there are many places I'd like to visit. Of course, if I had the time and money to spare, I'd also be able to put a lot more time into the Wongery, as well as to pay for illustrations and publicity and... all sorts of other things I can't do now.
(If I came from inherited wealth and didn't have to work for a living I would have so much more time and resources to get things done, and also I would be filled with self-loathing because I would think (correctly) that the only reason I was able to get all these things done was because I came from inherited wealth and didn't have to work for a living through no virtue of my own. Of course, I'm filled with self-loathing anyway, but for different reasons.)
Still, anyway, I feel like I've learned quite a bit working on this article. And of course this is far from the first time I've learned something from working on a Wongery article. Working on this article taught me a lot about Asian political geography (still not 100% sure that's the right term), but in other articles I've learned about biology, linguistics, mathematics, and other topics. Not to mention the (still rather rudimentary but better than they were) programming skills I've picked up in creating the various Wongery extensions (which still need a lot of work, but I'll get on that once I've finally gotten around to migrating the site to the new hosting plan that I've now been paying for for eight months without using it because I'm an idiot). Working on the Wongery has been very educational for me in a lot of ways. That's not, of course, the main purpose of the Wongery. It's not even one of the secondary purposes I discussed in my blog post about the purpose of the Wongery. But I guess it's kind of a serendipitous side effect. I do like learning new things.
Anyway, now to get back to rewriting the article about infected, which is the next item up.