The Shape of the Ship · 6:50pm May 2nd
Still working on the glossary and diagrams. It turned out to be a much bigger job than I'd anticipated, what with having to get the 3D model into much better shape than the "noodling around" stage it's been in for years. The ability to produce illustrations specific to fantasy/steampunkish airship equipment will be worth it, I think. I might as well include other terms pertinent to the story, such as phylactery, taewidha, interstitial vortex, and thaumochromatic detonation while I'm at it.
Nebula, full and bye
I started out intending to crib from the many, many Age of Sail glossaries out there, but I though it would be better if I only included things that I mentioned in the story itself instead of dropping insane stuff on y'all like this:
I think it will be a separate blog post that I'll link to from the stories that involve Nebula.
Just a heads up. While WOTC hasn't done so several other RPG fantasy companies like Paizo have moved on to other names for an object that contains a soul. Because before Gygax came up with the term for his Liches phylactery's only meaning was container of sacred scripture in several Jewish sects. Today a lot of people feel the term reeks of cultural insensitivity.
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If nothing else, it's not an accurate descriptor of the thing it's being used for. Still leaves an amusing feint of a Jewish lich whose phylactery and phylactery are two entirely separate objects.
You know, I work in IT. Like probably most professions, we have our own jargon. And quite the amount of it, I think. Whenever that one colleague of mine starts talking about whatever the newest trend in Kubernetes might be, it might as well be a session of buzzword bingo:
Yes, we should totally switch from Terraform in our cluster as IaC tool to OpenTofu, the fork that was created due to the BSL relicensing disaster. Will you update the Helm charts to do so? Oh, and we should migrate our Grafana to the newest version, too, while we're at it. Might as well throw an additional Prometheus node into it, thank you very much.
(I don't really like DevOps, in case you couldn't tell.)
I'm getting slightly nauseous looking at that diagram.
It’s interesting. With each term you listed, I have more certainty of what the term means in the context of the story. Definitely looking forward to seeing how right I may be.
Also, Nebula herself is looking quite majestic.
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Somewhat tangential, but I've occasionally wondered whether terms like "Show Bible" might eventually end up being renamed for similar reasons. The subject of evolving views on cultural sensitivity is a huge, huge subject though, and on the (all too rare) occasions it's not being reduced to one-liners on social media an absolutely fascinating one. I am in no way an expert, I just find it interesting.
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Editing the glossary (and the chapters) now...
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Nobody is amused by stuff like that nowadays, and any slip-up is assumed to come from ill-intent rather than ignorance.
Fun story: I just fought off a hit-team from Kimberly-Clark who was sent to rub me out because I habitually use "kleenex" to mean any sort of paper facial tissue.
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Thank you!
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Can we make the cape on this tack, d'you think? We might head up another half-point, but never more, not in this chop, and what leeway we're making, I have not the slightest. The snow and the pink will outpace us, sure, and we daren't shake out that tops'l reef, not if we don't want to take the sticks out of her.
Everybody loves their jargon!
Good luck!