A Tale of Two Worlds
Posted: Sat Nov 11, 2023 7:15 pm
So, I haven't posted any new articles for quite a while now. As I've mentioned before, things have been difficult lately, and it's been hard to make time to work on the Wongery. The time I have been able to devote to Wongery-related issues I've spent largely on matters other than writing articles, such as learning Javascript and PHP so I can finally implement the Gamespace and the other new namespaces and add the other new features I want the Wongery to have.
That doesn't mean, however, that I haven't been spending any time writing articles. There's one article in particular that I've been working on and that's been taking more time than it probably should to finish but that I expect to be the next article posted: an article on Djarvin, a nation on the world of Curcalen—and the location that, in line with what I said previously about choosing a particular location to focus on in each world, is going to be the focal location of Curcalen. And the main thing that's making that article take so long is that developing the nation of Djarvin ended up entailing considerable further development of the world of Curcalen itself.
Its main article going up on January 31, 2009, Curcalen was one of the first two worlds posted to the Wongery, preceded only by Dadauar about a month previous. But there's one big difference between Dadauar and Curcalen. Okay, there are a lot of differences between Dadauar and Curcalen. For example, one is a disk and the other is an inverted sphere. But the difference I have in mind is an extrinsic one, one more related to their manner of creation. Dadauar is a world that was first created almost thirty years ago. There are hundreds of thousands of words of material written about Dadauar that haven't made it into the Wongery yet. That doesn't mean I haven't added anything to it since; its original development was rather undirected and haphazard and before I wrote about it in the Wongery all its continents, for instance, had not been named. Still, the world itself has had decades of (unfocused and intermittent) development. There are many creatures, characters, countries, and more content that have already been designed for Dadauar but that aren't yet mentioned in the Wongery.
Curcalen, on the other hand, was newly created for the Wongery, and I've more or less been making it up as I went along. It didn't have the decades of development behind it that Dadauar had, and as I was trying to write the article on Djarvin I realized that there were important details about this country—particularly its climate and history—that relied on features of Curcalen itself that hadn't really been fleshed out.
I mentioned in a previous blog post that I had misplaced my map of Curcalen, although I probably shouldn't have mentioned it there since it had nothing to do with the rest of that post and was just an irrelevant paragraph plopped down in the middle of an unrelated discussion. But anyway, the map I misplaced (and, alas, at the time I'm writing this still haven't found) was a copy I'd printed out in order to write in the names of the continents and some other landmarks. I still had the map showing the contours of the world. I knew where Djarvin was; I knew the shape of the continent where it was located and the oceans around it. But that didn't mean I knew its climate and terrain, because I didn't really know how climate and weather worked on Curcalen. Sure, from the map I knew Djarvin's latitude, which might give me a rough idea of its temperature, but what were the prevailing wind patterns? Did they blow from the sea, bringing ample precipitation, or over the mountains to the east, losing their moisture and leaving Djarvin arid? Was there a nearby warm ocean current analogous to the Earth's Gulf Stream that might make the land balmier than its latitude alone would indicate? Before I could really detail Djarvin, I needed to do a lot of work on Curcalen as a whole.
I couldn't even rely on the way that weather worked on Earth and other planets of Herit. Curcalen is located on the plane of Zien in the esture of Usm, a cosmos with an entirely different makeup and entirely different physical laws from ours. Curcalen doesn't rotate, which meant no Coriolis force. It has a second sun moving at right angles to the primary, which complicates the solar effect on temperature. I had to figure out what effect all this would have on its climate and weather. I didn't have to work it all out completely rigorously from first principles, of course, but I at least needed to be consistent about it and make it seem vaguely plausible. So I spent some time devising Curcalen's temperature zones and wind and current patterns, making additional layers for them on my digital map.
Working map of Curcalen (equirectangular projection) with the temperature, current, and wind layers turned on
This dichotomy, of course, exists in the other worlds of the Wongery as well. Dadauar is not the only world that was created decades before the Wongery itself, but Curcalen is not the only world that was invented on the spot. Ideally, as the worlds are developed, it won't be obvious which are which. Obviously, over time the proportion will lean increasingly toward the latter; there is, after all, a finite supply of worlds we've already developed. That said, that supply hasn't run out yet; there are several worlds that have already been in development nearly as long as Dadauar that have yet to make their way to the Wongery but eventually will.
Anyway, I guess I'm not sure what the point of this post was, except to give you another glimpse into the workings of the Wongery. (Then again, I guess it could be argued it's unclear what the point of any of my posts are.) In any case, I ought to get back to work. I'm going to spend some more time today on the Javascript course I'm taking on Udemy (I'm a little over halfway done), and then maybe I'll actually get that Djarvin article posted today. (But honestly probably not.)
That doesn't mean, however, that I haven't been spending any time writing articles. There's one article in particular that I've been working on and that's been taking more time than it probably should to finish but that I expect to be the next article posted: an article on Djarvin, a nation on the world of Curcalen—and the location that, in line with what I said previously about choosing a particular location to focus on in each world, is going to be the focal location of Curcalen. And the main thing that's making that article take so long is that developing the nation of Djarvin ended up entailing considerable further development of the world of Curcalen itself.
Its main article going up on January 31, 2009, Curcalen was one of the first two worlds posted to the Wongery, preceded only by Dadauar about a month previous. But there's one big difference between Dadauar and Curcalen. Okay, there are a lot of differences between Dadauar and Curcalen. For example, one is a disk and the other is an inverted sphere. But the difference I have in mind is an extrinsic one, one more related to their manner of creation. Dadauar is a world that was first created almost thirty years ago. There are hundreds of thousands of words of material written about Dadauar that haven't made it into the Wongery yet. That doesn't mean I haven't added anything to it since; its original development was rather undirected and haphazard and before I wrote about it in the Wongery all its continents, for instance, had not been named. Still, the world itself has had decades of (unfocused and intermittent) development. There are many creatures, characters, countries, and more content that have already been designed for Dadauar but that aren't yet mentioned in the Wongery.
Curcalen, on the other hand, was newly created for the Wongery, and I've more or less been making it up as I went along. It didn't have the decades of development behind it that Dadauar had, and as I was trying to write the article on Djarvin I realized that there were important details about this country—particularly its climate and history—that relied on features of Curcalen itself that hadn't really been fleshed out.
I mentioned in a previous blog post that I had misplaced my map of Curcalen, although I probably shouldn't have mentioned it there since it had nothing to do with the rest of that post and was just an irrelevant paragraph plopped down in the middle of an unrelated discussion. But anyway, the map I misplaced (and, alas, at the time I'm writing this still haven't found) was a copy I'd printed out in order to write in the names of the continents and some other landmarks. I still had the map showing the contours of the world. I knew where Djarvin was; I knew the shape of the continent where it was located and the oceans around it. But that didn't mean I knew its climate and terrain, because I didn't really know how climate and weather worked on Curcalen. Sure, from the map I knew Djarvin's latitude, which might give me a rough idea of its temperature, but what were the prevailing wind patterns? Did they blow from the sea, bringing ample precipitation, or over the mountains to the east, losing their moisture and leaving Djarvin arid? Was there a nearby warm ocean current analogous to the Earth's Gulf Stream that might make the land balmier than its latitude alone would indicate? Before I could really detail Djarvin, I needed to do a lot of work on Curcalen as a whole.
I couldn't even rely on the way that weather worked on Earth and other planets of Herit. Curcalen is located on the plane of Zien in the esture of Usm, a cosmos with an entirely different makeup and entirely different physical laws from ours. Curcalen doesn't rotate, which meant no Coriolis force. It has a second sun moving at right angles to the primary, which complicates the solar effect on temperature. I had to figure out what effect all this would have on its climate and weather. I didn't have to work it all out completely rigorously from first principles, of course, but I at least needed to be consistent about it and make it seem vaguely plausible. So I spent some time devising Curcalen's temperature zones and wind and current patterns, making additional layers for them on my digital map.
Working map of Curcalen (equirectangular projection) with the temperature, current, and wind layers turned onThis dichotomy, of course, exists in the other worlds of the Wongery as well. Dadauar is not the only world that was created decades before the Wongery itself, but Curcalen is not the only world that was invented on the spot. Ideally, as the worlds are developed, it won't be obvious which are which. Obviously, over time the proportion will lean increasingly toward the latter; there is, after all, a finite supply of worlds we've already developed. That said, that supply hasn't run out yet; there are several worlds that have already been in development nearly as long as Dadauar that have yet to make their way to the Wongery but eventually will.
Anyway, I guess I'm not sure what the point of this post was, except to give you another glimpse into the workings of the Wongery. (Then again, I guess it could be argued it's unclear what the point of any of my posts are.) In any case, I ought to get back to work. I'm going to spend some more time today on the Javascript course I'm taking on Udemy (I'm a little over halfway done), and then maybe I'll actually get that Djarvin article posted today. (But honestly probably not.)