Nano Links
I owe yesterday’s cookbook cat vacuuming to the NaNoWriMo season. I haven’t been nanoing regularly for a while, though I have used the last couple of seasons to work on my Twine story format PrePub (for converting Twine stories to print-like formats), as well as a better Emacs mode for Twee. My “novels” have been test stories that never get very far. This year I’m working on a fixed format gamebook inspired by a clever French series, which should be an interesting exercise in the conversion of Twine to print.
One sign of the season I can never resist is the NaNoWriMo forums, with a side of the real Scrivener forums. NaNo qua trainwreck did not disappoint, opening up with a ritual apology from a long-time moderator; despite her absence posts are still moving around from place to place and disorienting people. I myself had trouble finding the Worldbuilding category when someone suggested it as a better destination for a moved post than the Software & Tech ghetto.
I don’t read it for the trainwrecks, though; most of what I get out of the forums is links. Today’s winner is VulgarLang, a commercial conlang generator. It does a lot of stuff, though how well is unclear at the free tier. (Initial reviews were pretty negative, though it may have improved.) It even outputs LaTeX dictionaries (but has you sign up for Overleaf to generate a PDF). It never ceases to impress me how people (i.e., developers) can make a living off of people (i.e., writers) who can’t make a living. Though to be fair, Vulgarlang’s market includes the far more profitable game and movie industries.
From there I found Polyglot, a tool for conlanging the more traditional way (uphill both ways with a hundred words for snow), and the new location of Gleb. Back in the day I wrote my own tool to help with my conlang, which needs more conlanging rather than more programming so I’ll be sticking with non-linguistic rabbit-holes for now.
© 2023 M. C. DeMarco
≪ Previous | Next ≫
