Ghost on Worldbuilding 1—Shiny New Universes · 6:28am Jun 25th, 2014
Hello my readers, garrulous and grand!
Yes. I know. I up and disappeared. My life pretty much sucks now. I don’t even have the time to write this, I should really be working on one of a thousand other things, but an idea settled in my brain and won’t let go. Also, I feel I should probably write something to amuse[1] you guys once in a while.
So. Worldbuilding.
Part The First—in which there isn’t anything about worldbuilding
I’m going to be talking about computers for a while.
Don’t worry, however, this won’t be about the temporal complexity of output-sensitive algorithms, or what happens to you if you try to parse HTML with regular expressions[2]. Rather, it is about how things develop in computers and how that runs contrary to not just what we expect but also to common sense. Eventually this will all lead to a point I have about worldbuilding. Honest.
So, back in the day, I used to be a fairly ardent user of Linux. I not only ran Linux as my primary OS—which was and is a perfectly sensible thing to do—I also evangelized for it. A lot. On mature reflection I was insufferable and it was only by good luck that I managed to grow out of this phase before someone clubbed me to death with an IBM Model M keyboard[3]—an act of retributive violence which, under the circumstances, would have probably been entirely justified.
This position has actually made me utter the phrase “Year X is going to be the year of Linux on the desktop!” in dead earnest.
If you are a techie you are either laughing or doing that rueful head-shake thing. If you are not, a quick explanation: Every year in the early noughties was lauded as The Year Of Linux on the Desktop. Obviously, none of them were, but there was an entire cottage industry of people writing articles on why year n+1—n+2 at the latest!—was going to be the crucial year when year n wasn’t. It seemed close a few times, but Macs made their big comeback and Microsoft got their collective brain cells oriented in the same direction long enough to make a few decent operating systems, and Linux never really hit the mainstream[4].
However.
As I type this, there are five Linux computers running within cat-swinging distance[5] of me. Five. My routers run Linux. My home server runs Linux. My phone runs Linux, and so does my tablet. I am also—as I type this—connected to two remote computers I manage, both running Linux.
Clearly 2014 is the Year Of Linux Everywhere But The Desktop.
Okay. Fine. But wasn’t this supposed to be about worldbuilding? Did I really write this to make an outdated point about operating systems?
Well… a bit. But there is a point: the point is how unlikely all of this is.
Time for a bit of a history lesson.
Linux—just like the BSD powering your iDevice—is a variant of Unix[6]. And Unix is, at its core, a hacky operating system glued together as a testbed for porting software. On a PDP-11 minicomputer[7]. In 1973. By two guys. On a bet[8].
This is insane.
Now, of course, the stuff powering your phone is fundamentally more advanced—it implements a whole host of handy new features, and knows all about modern hardware, sure, but its internal assumptions are pretty much still those of the flared-trousers, wide-lapel groovy original. Fr’instance your phone still sort of expects someone to plug a teletype into it. And it still uses a file security system that shows every indication of being hammered together by someone in an afternoon. All the groovy new stuff has been built around this ancient gnarled architecture that was invented for a use-case so wildly different the whole thing borders on the farcical.
To make matters even more amusing, the variant of Unix that’s most responsible for everything (except your desktop and/or your laptop) around you running SchizoOS was really created by a CS student[9] who wanted to do a hobby project and which then got added on by anyone who saw something about it that needed doing.
That, incidentally, is what’s running a good chunk of the planetary infrastructure.
...what?
[1] Amusement not guaranteed. Offer void where prohibited.
[2] Your skin is possessed by a colony of micro-demons and crawls away, each cell in its own direction. It stretches and writhes, ripping apart muscle and chipping bone, until—in supreme agony—it leaves you behind, flayed save for a few particularly malignant demonskn colonies that are busily boring inside you and will, as they multiply by Devil Mitosis, eventually cause your bloody corpse to bloat until the weakened muscles and ligaments give way and turn your cubicle into a crawling chaos of suppurating flesh-nodules, dancing mindlessly and tugging at a screaming nervous system that is, despite all probability still alive.
Like that disease that the starfish get but worse in every possible way. So don’t do it. Parsing HTML with regexes is the leading cause of coder Malignant Skinslither Syndrome. Don’t let it be you! This PSA brought to you by Coders United For Using A Damn XML Parser Already.
[3] Imagine the keyboard in front of you, but converted for tank warfare. That’s a Model M. It turned out to be commercially not viable because it doesn’t break. Ever. Even when used to club people.
[4] Yes, yes, I know you run it, dear reader, and that it works fine. I do so, too. But with 1.62% of the desktop market share—less than Vista!—it hardly set the world on fire.
[5] The SI cat-swinging distance, of course. That’s 0.7822 imperial gyrotabbies, for all you anglophones.
[6] Dear readers more technically savvy than me: Yes. I know. Yes. That too. Yes. Yes. But the broad point still stands—they are Unix-y.
[7] This ‘mini,’ incidentally meant ‘does not fill an entire room.’
[8] Okay, that one’s a lie.
[9] Dear readers more technically savvy than me: Yes. I know. No, I’m not calling it GNU/Linux. I’m trying to tell a story here.
Part The Second—The Part Where He Talks About Worldbuilding
Hello. This is the part where I talk about worldbuilding[10].
(Could be worse. I could have made a ‘The Cake is a Lie’ reference.)
So what was that whole bit of computer natter in aid of?
Well, computing is absurdly young. In your normal regular-strength science you stand on the shoulders of giants. In computer science, we stand on each-other’s feet (to paraphrase Hamming[11]). In something that’s been around for such a brief period of time you’d expect a certain orderly progression, a certain amount of sense. You’d expect that you could tell the history of How We Came To Be Here and it would make a story of some sort.
Well it does. Only that story turns out to be Joyce’s Ulysses[12].
Instead of progression and sense, it is a welter of inertia, randomness, things being invented and re-invented more than once[13], technologies winning out for obscure reasons, and nothing making sense, ever.
So how does this apply to worldbuilding?
A common flaw[14] I see in worldbuilding is neatness. This place is called so-and-so. This legend goes like so. The history of the world converges neatly on present day and everything in it serves a purpose. Aside from the odd plot-relevant mystery or controversy, everything is safely nailed down in a form that can be infodumped for the reader’s edification.
Now I would be belaboring the point if I said this wasn’t realistic: obviously it isn’t. Something so trivial like how your phone got to be the way it is is more like a game of mad-libs than a story. But ‘realism’ is not really the goal when it comes to worldbuilding. Not unless you are a deity. However, I would like to suggest that neatness is not only not realistic, it is also detrimental to your writing.
Why?
Well, first, the neatness is immersion breaking. Anyone who’s read the history of anything can tell it doesn’t come in neat purposeful chunks proceeding from A to B. So you can’t really expect the reader to believe in this shiny new universe with hardly any wear on it, looking all smooth and plasticky It strains credibility.
Second, nailing down your world with precision builds bad habits. You get in the habit of sneaking in infodumps when you really shouldn't because, well, you wrote it down all neat-like, and it would be a shame to let all of that go to waste. Worse yet, the fact that you world has a single true narrative to it without ambiguity and senselessness that is the hallmark of real history tempts you to write from that point of view. And the problem with that is that none of your characters are likely to have that clean point of view. This robs you of a powerful tool because having a character be iron-certain about a version of history is a good way to show something about that character and how they were taught, just like having character express doubts and uncertainties is a great way to suggest, for instance, a scholarly mien. Not to mention that adding a brief argument between two learned characters over the correct way to call the Firstwise Empire is a great way to—at the same time—characterize, provide a bit of banter, and sneak in exposition all at the same time.
Third, using the bits where history side-tracks in your world is a good way to fake depth. Let’s face it, creating complete worlds is hard work[citation needed], and a very common trick is to fake greater depth[15]—create the impression of the enormity of the world without outlining the whole thousand-year history of the Everwar or what-have-you. There’s plenty of tricks to do this: the name-drop[16], the spurious precision gambit[17], the old standby that is the cryptic conversation[18], the fictionary[19], the epigraph[20], and so on. Allow me to suggest another one: studious uncertainty. That’s when you have a character not know something and by the way they don’t know it or are mistaken/uncertain you suggest the enormity of the subject in question.
And fourth, and perhaps most important, the cracks where the history doesn’t quite fit properly are great places to lever in some story. A world whose history and general disposition are a bit on the chaotic side generate a lot of tension, and tension can be mined for rich veins of story. Even if it is not central for your plot, a touch of controversy or confusion and how your characters react to it adds a lot of ways to characterize your characters in a remarkably small number of words. And, lastly, even if you don’t use it for plot or for characters, the absurdity that often results from this messy sort of history can be used for humor.
[10] Achievement unlocked: The Part Where He Talks About Worldbuilding.
[11] Dear tech-savvy readers: Yes, that one.
[12] And the PCJr came about during the Circe episode. (This may just be the most obscure joke I ever wrote.)
[13] I think the smartphone/tablet got invented three or four times before it stuck. Two of those were by Apple.
[14] To the extent that I am capable of spotting flaws in worldbuilding, of course.
[15] Of course, as some of my pre-readers can attest, sometimes you get crazy writers with a world-building addiction who insist on making a backstory for everything. I wouldn’t know anything about that, naturally.
[16] “Not since Vaitris the Haunted has the world seen a more vicious warlord!”
[17] “Eighty-two years, and nine emperors had passed since then, but the Alabaster Palace was still unequalled in all of the Quad Kingdoms and farther, all the way to the Jade Hall.”
[18]
“The prophecy of Ymmr is right!”
“Then our fears are confirmed? The paraclete is ascendant?”
“Are not the Orbs of Tanneir clouded and opaque? Their seers blind for the first time since the advent of Shadowed God?”
“Then we must call upon the sage of the Alabaster Palace.”
[19] The at’ral groundlings have broken through at the ummul of the Ninefold Enclosure. I have dispatched all of our zayigs.
[20] “The sands will turn red, and the Azīf will offer no relief under the shadow of the earth./The ground will disgorge its dead, a monstrous dew-watered birth.” The Book of Measured Silences.
Part The Third—Envoi
This is my first proper attempt to be a bit[21] like Bad Horse in my blogging—albeit a lot more silly—and tackle something that has nothing directly to do with my stories. Do leave a comment to tell me what you think of this and if I should continue.
Oh, and thanks for reading. 
[21] A very small, tiny bit.
This is good stuff, Ghost[1]. Please do keep it up.
[1] Well, everything you post seems good to me, YMMV etc.
I approve very much of this post
You live!
Do keep posting this stuff.
This is good stuff. I've heard similar, if not as comprehensive, writing advice before. The one I've heard is the idea that you should have your characters just be wrong about the world and history. Like you plan everything out, then come up with a completely false history that one character believers, then another completely false belief in another kingdom that another character might believe. Simply make even your learned characters *wrong* about something. The unreliable narrator trick, but applied to worldbuilding. What you have here is a much more comprehensive view of pretty much the same thing.
As for more of this, yes please. A bit rambling at the start, but I could see where you were going with it so it wasn't too much trouble slogging through it.
In honor of computer related history for those of you who haven't run across it.
Maybe I'm missing something blindingly obvious, but a lot of this just doesn't seem like it comes up for me. For instance, you mention the "thousand-year history of the Everwar" as if the story doesn't take place across that thousand-year history. If it doesn't, I don't get why you would give a thousand-year history of the Everwar--the beginning might matter, and a few incidents from it might influence the present, but what matters most is what the world is like now after those thousand years. Are you saying there are writers who give the whole thousand-year history even if only portions of it matter to the story?
To try to give an example of where I'm coming from, the villain in one of my stories is the oldest surviving lifeform in the spirit world. The protagonists are teenagers who know little to nothing about the spirit world. They don't really get a history beyond "This thing is old and wants to eat you," because they haven't been around that long and don't have access to secondhand information.
Also, are all your examples from 16-20 supposed to sound horribly unreadable?
Oooh, fun.
See, this is why I write in existing universes made by smarter people than me. I don't need to worry.
Is it sad that I found the computer preamble horrendously entertaining? The segue was also very well done.
2232598 I approve very much of your Avatar if only because I am a non-recovering Magic:tG addict, and Worldslayer is best equip ever.
Hah! And here I thought you were going to make an entirely different point, namely that it's perfectly okay to build in directions veering very much away from the show and general fanon.
The point you make is a good one, though, and something people should keep in mind more. Indeed, the show itself uses the creative vagueness and the lack of over-neatness very well indeed to create a sense of Equestria as a real place with a long history in a big, complex world that we only see a slice of.
And yes, do continue please, if you have the time for it!
I always enjoy it when an author waxes on about a topic they are passionate for. Especially when it's a topic we can all stand to know more about.
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I was, of course, exaggerating for comedic(?) effect, but, yes, lengthy exposition is something SF&F suffers from. Not, perhaps, to the extent of the whole history of the Everwar, but certainly past the point it adds to the tale rather than subtracts.
Some stories avoid world-bulding problems, certainly. Presumably you made your characters into audience proxies who are learning as they go, and that's perfectly fine. That's not always an available solution.
To take my own scribblings as example, I can't really start writing about the Equestrian Civil Service without explaining what it is, how it works, and how Leafy, Spinny, and Dotty fit into it.
They are supposed to sound like broad parodies of those tricks. Not so much 'unreadable' as 'amusingly purple and hack-y,' but yes they weren't meant in earnest.
Also [20] is an incredibly obtuse joke you need a working knowledge of the Waste Land and Lovecraft to get. Mostly for my own amusement.
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Thanks!
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Oh, you'll want to do some world-building sooner or later. It's an insidious thing. Like the Dark Side, except less lightning and more amateur cartography.
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The computer stuff was meant to be amusing, though perhaps more so for techie readers.
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Hey, rambling is my thing. Well that and footnotes. And errant pedantry.
I have a lot of things.
But, yes, this is the suggestion a sort of unreliable narration as applied to the world, though I would suggest more creative uncertainty rather than outright falsehoods. Not because a falsehood would be bad—I can see that sort of thing being enormously powerful—but because it is a high-risk play. It's hard enough squeezing in the exposition to get a single vision of a world into play, let alone a false one and the corrected one. That said, when it is done right it works. See, for instance, Mistborn.
2232656 it does sound fun. I ioght eventually try my hand at it. For now I have other things which don't need it.
This is relevant to my interests. Moreover, this is relevant to my writing. Essay bookmarked with gratitude.
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Come to the dark side! We have cookies.
Dark cookies.
With like, chocolate.
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You are very welcome! Glad I could help.
You are quite correct about the nature of history, it's something I noticed long ago when trying to track down the origins of, of all things, measurements. I think I was in elementary school at the time and someone had just mentioned the metric system to me. So the first half was an interesting spin on something I already knew, but I found the second half a new take on it since it then applied that knowledge and gave me all kinds of quasi-literary terms like "fictionary". I'd certainly enjoy seeing more such posts if you feel like writing them.
"Not to mention that adding a brief argument between two learned characters over the correct way to call the Firstwise Empire is a great way to—at the same time—characterize, provide a bit of banter, and sneak in exposition all at the same time. "
John Biles uses this to great effect in his Mystara's Little Ponies: Friendship is Adventuring. Sure, he's using a mashup of two established worlds, but he adds a lot of details and the fusion changes many others.
Also, I found 16-20 quite amusing. Actually, I think 20 could probably work in a serious setting, it's got the right heft for people who don't get the joke.
[4] On the other hand, is of course false, as your own market share information can tell you.
Has the evil horse warned you off of his territory yet?
In seriousness I quite enjoyed reading it, even though I knew most of it already - that's the humour kicking in, I think - and there were one or two truly useful bits in there which I'll be cheerfully stealing.
Not sure if I like it as much as another Dotted Line story though... it's hard to judge the opportunity cost from this side of the screen. On the other hand, I suppose we could chain you to your keyboard... it's apparently sturdy enough...
2232702 But do you have snickerdoodles? Maybe chocolate snickerdoodles?
Which build? XD (Don't bother answering, I don't know jack diddly piss about Linux, except that I don't use it.
)
And I remember that keyboard. Good times...
I am reasonably positive that applies to every scientific discipline EVER.
PLEASE! The Jade Hall is by FAR superior. Or at least, that's what I have gathered from the hushed whispers of those who claim to have seen inside it's forbidden doors. Of course, by the next day, these people, and all records or memory of their existence seems to always have vanished.
Still, it sounds REALLY swank. Makes the Alabaster Palace seem like a hovel really.
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Hmm . . . I just looked over your first chapter. I guess you technically have an infodump. Technically--two paragraphs and the tail of a third make for a pretty short infodump, and the only info that's actually dumped is "Nobles think they run the country" and "the Civil Service keeps the country functioning." (Then again, that seems to be part of your point.)
I just realized something. This might be a stupid question, but do you consider Equestria a setting that meets your standards for worldbuilding? It's not a neat or precise setting, but it's a very convenient one--almost anything can exist if it fits the overall setting mood and progresses the plot of the current episode. (See also: almost every action anime or manga that's intended for young adult males and isn't the original Fullmetal Alchemist, plus at least 50% of tabletop roleplaying game settings.)
(And for total heresy, I don't consider your Civil Service stories believable within the context of the magical land of Equestria, nor do I think they have to be. I'm totally okay with Equestria being way different from Earth, so I'm equally okay with Civil Service Equestria being messier and more complicated than canon Equestria.)
Please don't take this as picking at your post or anything; I'm basically thinking out loud.
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Which Equestria? The show one? It's barely a setting, really. There's no real consistency, and not that much continuity either. Things just happen when they need to. Which is fine. Most cartoons work like that.
As for the Civil Serviceverse I write/wrote it to be compatible with show Equestria as much as it can be, but of course there are differences, and of course that's not how things 'really' work in the show. The whole idea is preposterous. But if it is—just—possible to imagine an overworked fuzzy grey unicorn running around behind the scenes fixing things, I am content.
But yes, push comes to shove, my Equestria is considerably darker than show Equestria. Bad things exist. War, poverty, crime, &c &c. However the optimistic tone of show Equestria is preserved as much as it can be. This tone of cheerful optimistic cynicism (of a sort) is best illustrated by this (non-canon) talk between Dotted Line and a brand new princess.
"Somepony in your position, Your Highness, might well ask how it is that we in the Civil Service govern Equestria. This reveals a fundamental misconception, I'm afraid. The chief purpose of the Service isn't to govern, but to conceal the unutterable secret at the heart of Equestrian government."
"Which is?"
"That it cannot be governed at all."
"So... so what do you do?"
"We write reports. Sometimes in triplicate."
"Does that help?"
"It's very soothing."
"But how do you control..."
"We don't do that either, Your Highness. Equestria's far too big to control."
"So what do you—"
"We let ponies get on with their lives, mainly, and when it is needed—which is always—we steer."
"Just that?"
"It's amazing what you can do with a good steer, Your Highness."
"And what does the Cabinet do?"
"Well. Um. It's, ah, well of course, it's... uh. It's very decorative, wouldn't you say? All those terribly important ponies? All that pomp and circumstance? Very fetching."
2232834
Slackware, then SuSE, then a distribution I built from scratch, then Gentoo, then Ubuntu. Since you ask. I'm probably going Mint when I have the time.
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I'm pleased you like it. The terminology—some of it, at any rate—is TvTropes derived.
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I'm expecting to find a severed human head[1] in my bed at any moment. But so far my life has been death-threat free.
[1] Think about it...
I love my Model M.
And I love GhostofHeraclitus updates.
Footnotes. Footnotes too.
And anything computer, of course.
And the word love pales by comparison to what I feel for worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is my
waifu*is shot*butt tattoo*ahem* enjoyable hobby.What I'm basically getting at, therefore, is that this post is Relevant To My Interests and any future ones will most assuredly be so too. I love sharing a fandom with someone as delightful as you.
I notice, that after all the times people have tried to give us tablets and smart phones, it wasn't until they started resembling the PADDs from Star Trek TNG [1] that they really took off.
[1] In most respects, they resemble, but are superior to, the PADDs. The one place they fall short is durability. I swear, if I tossed around my Kindle like Geordi does his engineering tablet, it would crack in half. I think the PADDs are the only electronic device on the ship that DON'T blow up when she's hit by something.
[2] So that is what happens when I try to devise a way to match tags and process what is inside using RegExps. I thought it was just despair.
[3] It would still work after that. Mine survived worse.
BTW, I actually wrote a brief history of Unix, and how Linux basically took over it, as part of a course conclusion dissertation. For a law degree. And explained it all in front of a panel of professors, each of them either a lawyer or a judge, with a straight face. Yeah, I managed to con lawyers into hearing about computers and engineering
On the second part: points of view. It's important to have characters think differently (otherwise they might as well be clones), and one of the ways to handle that is through incomplete, and often outright incompatible, views of history. My basic real world example would be Che Guevara; in the US he is apparently seen, as often as not, as a kind of South-American terrorist that often targeted US interests, while where I live he is seen as a hero that fought against an overly aggressive and meddling US.
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What the show uses is, IMHO, what I would call lazy world building. But lazy in the computational sense, which means not doing something until it's necessary. The show producers seem to intentionally avoid setting in stone anything about the scenario unless it's needed for some episode. It can work, but if the writer is not experienced, there's a good chance of painting oneself into a corner, from where it's usually only possible to exit through a plot hole.
Fascinating. I admit, most of my historical worldbuilding has focused largely on singular events (Just after Discord's defeat, how
Pinkie Pie got her cutie markEquestria was made, etc.,) so I don't actually have much of a historical structure. And, of course, Discord's reign (Square Root of Negative Bundt Cake – Year of the Prancing Marmot) meant that even the Princesses don't remember their origins.Instead, I focus mostly on the metaphysics. How magic works is a much more interesting question to me than what happened in the past. Also, given that I made probability space rather important, every conceivable history applies somewhere.
Still, this was an incredibly helpful blog for knowing what not to do. History is rarely neat, and when it is, it's usually manufactured. Of course, that raises the question of who made it...
Heh, amusing. Sometimes I think Linux is best only for those who enjoying poking around and being in more control of their operating system than most people can handle.[1] I'm more in favor of calling it Linux rather than GNU/Linux anyway since in my mind the kernel is actually more central and important than the tools since the tools cannot work without it, but different tools can be written to work with the kernel. I suppose it can be seen the other way, but, in my mind, without the kernel the tools are useless. Calling it a variant of UNIX is utterly misleading, given that it's not a derivative work. It would better to say that it was designed to be compatible in all the ways that matter. From my limited understanding, the way UNIX/Linux addresses filesystems and some of other stuff seems remarkably flexible in a way that fosters adaptation to unexpected new things.
1. Most people want the computer to do lots of things for them without them having to tell it what to do and can put up with a degree of imprecision, frustration, and unexpected results in exchange. Others want it to work exactly as they desire...
I'll admit that I don't read your blog posts on writing for their content; not a writer. That said, I do read them for all the new words I'll end up learning. A GhostPost is usually accompanied by 3 google tabs all cycling the search phrase "Define: [GhostWords]". Thanks for that!
Sometimes I think half the fun of fanfiction is filling in the gaps left by shoddy storytelling in the core property. To quote Leonard Cohen, "There is a crack in everything / That's how the light gets in."
Good to "hear" your voice again.
Great blog as usual Ghost, with a more 'realistic' take on worldbuilding.
Of course, now I want to read about zayigs and the Alabaster Palace.
This post has been quite enlightening. I guess I'd been doing something kinda similar with different remembered histories on a tribal scale (unicorns, pegasi, and earth ponies were planned to each espouse a different version of history) in my own main stories, but it looks like it will be a good idea to have history differ on a more individual scale as well. Having my pegasi in particular have more anarchic variation there is an intriguing prospect for me. It fits, too, as their primary mode of history is oral traditions
handedhoofedpassed down from one generation's storytellers to the next. So many opportunities and implications, especially when some ponies forget which stories were complete fabrications to begin with!2232890
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It amused me endlessly that when they needed to transport data from point A to point B on Voyager they used big boxes of PADDs. Because obviously that's how you'd do it.
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Yep. Che Guevara is a recent-history figure whose writings survive and whose existence is exceptionally well documented and yet in the span of a handful of countries her varies from "The guy you put on you T-shirt." to "Communist Antichrist" to "Hasta Siempre, Comadante."
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Oh there's a bit about metaphysics in "Ghost on Worldbuilding 2:
Electric BoogalooQuaint and Curious Volumes of Forgotten Lore."2233063
And here's me thinking my footnotes forestalled this sort of errant nitpickery.
I meant Unix variant as in 'hewing to the Unix philosophy of design." But if you must have precision, I'd say it is a non-certified work-alike OS implementing (mostly) the POSIX standard for interoperability.
Better?
And, yes, UNIX is very flexible. Astoundingly so. That's why it survived. But that's not to say it couldn't be done better. The security system, in particular, is not even close to what it should be and has since been kludged to hell and back.
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Out of curiosity, what were the new words?
2233448
Oh, certainly. Elaborate head-canonization is one of the singular joys of fandom.
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The Alabaster Palace? What's to say? Poets have spent gallons of ink failing to describe it, painters acres of canvas failing to depict it, and kings oceans of blood failing to conquer it. It rises from a fertile crescent of land made as the great Lhui river changes its course in the arid plains of Lhan: Tall. Graceful. Heartbreaking.
Some say that the Valir the Builder paid the architect his weight in rubies, others that he had him blinded so that he could never exceed the splendor of the palace. Others, however, say that the designs were the work of an ancient ifrit who dwelt alone in the sand wastes for longer than the pillars of Urd have been standing. They say that the ifrit showed the emperor the vision of the palace in a dream: not as a building but as the world. Below, icy waters and a dark sea, above that peerless gardens, and sun-dappled copses of fragrant trees, above that the palace itself, dancing in the air, insubstantial as a mirage, real as death. And above that a burning light. Fire from on high.
The emperor spent a hundredweight of treasure seeking out the ifrit and when he found him dispatched slaves laden with gold, dancing troupes, and prancing animals, and on a silk cushion a sword of starfall steel of such virtue that lesser blades perished at its touch. The ifrit refused all gifts but offered to design the Alabaster Palace for a single boon, to be repaid by the Emperor's descendants ninety-nine years hence.
No matter its origin, it is without peer, its delicate spires reaching to the very zenith, and its deep, dark cellars, like the roots of a mountain, reaching all the way to the nadir. Its walls are slender and shimmer, unreal, above the sprawling gardens, but admit no foe, and do not break under any assault, magical or mundane. It has a thousand and one rooms, each more splendid than the last, and its great chamber is roofed with sapphire, pearls, and gold in the day, and ebony and diamonds in the night: always a perfect image of the sky above. Deep underneath it has rooms filled with treasure, and rooms whispering with a thousand flowing streams, and rooms, too, with doors leading to places distant and incredible. And deeper still, at the outermost extension of its roots that gnarl through the world, there is the lightless sea, where nameless things swim in the inky depths.
It is said, too, that this sea is so deep, so hidden, that Death herself dares not descent that far for fear of being trapped by the enormity above and the emptiness below. It is said that those who dwell on its shores are safe from death's touch, and that the current emperor, may he be both blessed and wise, has caused a great chamber to be built there for himself as final refuge from the common fate of us all. But that, ah, that's a story for another time.
A zayig, however, is merely a cavalry unit consisting of four faals ('hunts') each consisting of a hundred Mozcyx warriors astride destrier sunspiders. The warriors wear the heavy chitin plating they are famous for, of course, and wield the dreaded Mos'h forked spear and the small but deadly bows they are famed for. It is said that, for sheer terror, no sound beats the ululation of warlike Mozcyx combined with the alien, blood-chilling sound of their mounts stridulation: the tearing, rasping sound they make rubbing their vicious fangs together in anticipation of a feast.
...since you asked.
2233584
You could certainly get a lot of mileage out of the differences between the worldview of various tribes, and divergent views of history are one way of doing it.
2233709
You are, quite literally, the first Linux user I have ever met who has admitted it's security system is not a flawless work of art that makes your computer an impregnable fortress. (Never cared much for the word impregnable. Too much like unsinkable...)
Most conversations I have had with Linux users, however, usually degenerate around this point...One thing I have learned about the internet is that there are three things you never discuss with people. Religion, politics,
The Great Pumpkinand your OS.2233863
No sandboxing, no real RBAC, the nine-billion-year-old "here's a couple of octal digits—that's your file permission" solution... Please. It's miles better than Windows of course (though with UAC, hated as it was/is, things are looking up), but it's old. And it is far from perfect. Sure, with skill you can secure it pretty well, but it's not exactly made easy.
I find that having to deal with various software systems in a professional capacity burns out any trace of playing favorites from your system right quick.
2233938
In my experience, Windows, lately, has the problem that it tries to secure itself largely by restricting it's users as much as possible. Vista in particular...
Linux is an astoundingly flexible system, provided you have the skill to use it, and I think that's the crux of it. The reason so many Linux users seemed to be married to their OS and their favorite build is that you have to be to be able to make sure you have sufficient skills to get it to do what you want. Windows works (much) better if you know your way around it (there is very little you can't get it to do if you know how to use the command line), but it's perfectly usable if you don't. Again, except Vista, which was just a total trainwreck. An OS made by marketing, not programmers. Apple products are even worse about being restrictive, but are basically made so that someone without an ounce of tech savvy can enjoy using them.
For me, I lack the kind of skill and patience to learn to use Linux, but I could never stand to use an Apple, so it's Windows for me. I ended up running XP until it simply wasn't viable to do it anymore. Fortunately by then 7 was workable. As for it's security holes, well...I know a trick or two about dealing with viruses at least.
You sir, make some very good points.
2233709 Damn! Once again, I stand in awe (okay, sit in awe) of the awesome might of your world-building and descriptive powers. This is the closest that I can come to for a literary squee:
p.s. Reminds me of the tale from the Griffon ambassador about that kickass sword that they made (another fantastic story!
).
p.p.s. You keep making me have to think of different synonyms for 'excellent'.
2233709
Let's count, shall we?
First off there's garrulous. I know, I know: the first sentence? This has never happened before! [1]
Evangelized: I didn't know the actual meaning
Gyrotabbies: No, I didn't get the joke until Google itself laughed at me
Welter: No witty comment here, sorry
Edification: Heh, appropriate in a sense
Belaboring: A new verb to apply to dear mother
Mien: Demeanor? Similiar? Completely different? Sounds close enough.
Spurious: That one threw me. I thought it would be in the same vein as 'spur of the moment'
Epigraph: Obvious in hindsight, but it still sounded Ghost enough to get typed into the GOOG
Envoi: The end!
I think that's all of them...
[1] Insert premature ejaculation joke here
2234051
2234091
Awww. Thanks. I love creating these little snippets in High Mythic. It's very relaxing. This one comes with a (massively obvious) literary reference free of charge, too.
2234092
My, my. It's true. I have bad habits in writing. My sentences are—of course—sententious, aspiring to aphorisms, but worse yet, it seems I've also fallen prey to sesquipedalian scribomania—if you'll forgive the chimeric turn of phrase, I thought added alliterative appeal outweighed strict adherence to the dicta of etymology.
Heavens, but it's exhausting to write like that. It's like I ate a thesaurus.
Anyway, I'm glad I'm providing a nice vocab workout. And I'm rather proud of the 'gyrotabby' as a unit of measurement.
2234128
Ah, once more I must descend into my Googtionary for further clarification! Well played, sir.
2234143
Good, too, because it gave me time to fix a really mortifying typo I made because spelling, how the eff does it work. Seriously, may I just say as a Devious Foreign Person: English spelling makes no sense whatsoever. I know it is a trite point to make since everyone knows it doesn't make sense, but seriously, it's the (horrible, unwanted) gift that keeps on giving. We are talking about a language where 'fish' can reasonably be spelled 'ghoti.'
2234128 If you write like that to relax, I'm impressed all the more.
And for all it's marvelousness (even if it was partially cribbed from another bit), I get the impression that you threw that together relatively quickly; I'd probably have to struggle for more than a week to come up with something half as good as that!
Do you roleplay as well? Cause it sounds like you'd make a brilliant GM with your descriptive power and logical ability. Assuming, of course, that you didn't have a bunch of players who weren't just there for some hack-n-slash.
2234162
It isn't really cribbed from another bit. There's a few sentences that sneakily reference a rather famous bit of literature, but aside from that it's pretty much fresh from my head. And, no, it didn't take long at all. About as long as it took me to type it out, really, free-associating all the while.
And, yes, I do roleplay. Not as much as I'd like, what with time being scarce, but I do GM some Pathfinder from time to time. I also play a mean game of Münchausen.
Bravo.
Finally, someone calls out the "neatness" of so many worldbuilding efforts. I can't tell you how many times[1] I've turn away from a story because the first six paragraphs are nothing but dry exposition about the past and some ancient battle and oh dear we're never going to start this story, are we?
This needs to be part of the official Fimfiction Writing Guide.
[1] No, really, I can't. Who in their right mind keeps a tally like that?
2234182 Fair enough; my bad.
But still, holy crap for doing that with free-association. 
I also roleplay not as much as I'd like: I'm only able to get together once a month with some friends to do so. One of the GMs runs a predominantly political game, and definitely shares your pathos (I think that's the right term) in regards to world-building and reasonable character interactions. And the game is made all the better for it.
Amusingly enough, I think that he did a better job of it than the gamebook, and even the source material. 
Oh, yes. I knew following you would pay off eventually. Unfortunately, I know buggerall about operating systems, so I'll have to stick to the tangential subject of worldbuilding.
It's a good distinction to draw, between neat and messy worldbuilding. I think you're latching onto the same thing Harrison does when he rails against "worldbuilt fantasy".
I think that resistance of the desire for completion is really sexy. And yes, more realistic too -- but I think that's secondary virtue. Opacity and ambiguity are just so much fun.
2234234
There's something to be said for that link, though for my mind there's altogether too much snobbery there. "Worldbuilding: the accretion of inert details – doublets and barding, falchions and lyres – where fiction should be gravid with molecular intensities. As if writers of epic fantasy were all frustrated antique dealers," one commenter says. What does that even mean? Molecular? What?
That said, to me worldbuilding is making dreamscapes of staggering unreality seem not just plausible but on some level impossible to doubt. Re-creating the same western quasi-medieval[1] setting over and over again is... well it isn't much fun, let's just say.
[1] Actually, even my rudimentary education in history is enough to tell me that your ISO-standard fantasy setting is so far away from medieval that the word 'quasi' is really being made to carry too large a burden in that sentence.
2234271
You're quite right about snobbery. One doesn't read Harrison's stuff for a circumspect and reserved analysis of fantasy.
Impossible to doubt, though. Now that's interesting. I've seen immersivity spoken about as though everything needed to be checked for consistency. Here, though, it looks like you're in favour of a more oneiric quality, where the world can be completely batshit, but the author's charisma directs the reader's gaze away from the bits where the solder is visible. I ... think I agree with that.
As a fellow linux user, someone familiar with most of the computer related references here, I laughed pretty hard[1] reading this post.
Thanks, and please post more of the ilk when the mood strikes, I always look forward to reading your work. 
[1] I might have ended up reading one of my co-workers the RegEx, "Unix-y" and "Achievement unlocked" footnotes.
If people didn't gratuitously misremember the history they learned at school, then 1066 And All That wouldn't be the second - funniest book in the English language.
And if that history weren't the result of somebody or several somebodies fitting the facts to their own particular narratives and leaving out the best parts, then The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody wouldn't be the funniest.
2233938
A lot of it was lack of foresight, both in not anticipating future problems and in thinking that future-proofing for some of the detected problems wasn't necessary, because there was no way in hell those systems would still be in use when the problem would happen (Y2K bug, exhausting the IPv4 address space, etc).
Which might be a way to engage in the world building this blog describes, since the same forces act on history as a whole. Which mistakes and blunders did the previous generations do? When, and in which manner, did they prepare for things that never happened, or failed to plan for things that happened? Where did they actually manage to plan, but had issues implementing what needed to be done? Where are the things that were cobbled together with the intent of being replaced soon, that then became permanent, be they laws, treaties, engineering works, etc? The real world is chock-full of all that.
(And that is before we even get to conflicting agendas. Just look at how politics work in many countries around the world; opposite political parties are out to effectively sabotage each other. The same can happen between any kind of rivals, be they neighbors, towns, companies, countries, etc.)
2233709
Interestingly, my first reaction to the description of the Alabaster Palace was to imagine where the legend might be imprecise, which patches of the tale were woven out of the solid threads of fact and which where spun out of gossamer and dew by some aspiring bard.
2234450
I believe the point wasn't about avoiding consistency, but rather avoiding perfection. Avoiding that feeling that the world is made of pieces that fit perfectly and work without a hitch, cogs that fit neatly together and never miss a step. Avoiding that surreal quality that makes the reader instinctively feel like the world is a fake[1].
A real world isn't that perfect. There are pieces that don't fit, damaged parts that either were never repaired or couldn't be made pristine, mistakes, etc. It works, but not in silent perfection and harmony.
Also, I believe the point was never to hide the welds, but to, in a way, showcase them. Showcase because actually creating them is hard; it's harder to determine how something works in a less than perfect way, and do so with a believable tone, than it's to find the perfect fit; due to that, the world being built will likely end with far less such gaps and imperfections than the real world, which means every one has to be made to count.
[1]An interesting movie reference for this is the Matrix. The agents mention that the original Matrix was perfect, flawless, with everyone living happily, but the human brain rejected that version of the world. The machines needed to add flaws, problems, in order to make humanity actually believe the Matrix was real.