Aleae Iaciens

Moving house

Mon, 17 Apr 2006 09:20:39 -0500

Since I'm already maintaining one weblog at my website, it seems a little silly to keep paying for TypePad's service. Thus, I'm moving Aleae Iaciens over here. The new address is already active, as you can see, and has all of AI's previous posts (and comments to those posts); the old site will remain active until the end of the month.

The new Aleae Iaciens has an Atom feed; please feel free to use it. At the end of the month, when I cancel the TypePad site, I'll look into migrating the existing Livejournal feed if nobody's done so.

How Icons Work

Fri, 03 Feb 2006 20:33:05 -0500

As long-time readers know, I've been struggling with the idea of Icons for a while now, and today I think I've finally figured out how they're going to work. This is a synthesis of some ideas that I've had before, fade's original concept, and my recent study of ancient Greek philosophy. Comments are, as always, welcome.

Upcoming posts

Tue, 13 Dec 2005 00:26:02 -0500

I don't really have any time at the moment to give a full update; the end of the semester will do that to you. But I can give you a sneak peek of what's coming down the pike...

The Religion of Frontier

Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:23:33 -0500

I've decided to post this even though it's not finished, both to get something up and to see if I can get feedback. Also, the concepts that went into this gave me a way to work Icons in that I like a lot, so this is laying the groundwork for that as well. Enjoy!

Updates

Sun, 20 Nov 2005 14:24:23 -0500

One of the things I really, really love about TypePad is that pretty much every page on the administrative side takes variables through POST and GET. The logical consequence of this, naturally, is that if you forget that in this particular (otherwise generally fully-featured) text editor, CMD-Left Arrow means Navigate Back instead of Home, you realize only just a moment too late that what you've done is erase the 500-word post you just wrote, because TypePad will generate the page from scratch when you hit CMD-Right Arrow to navigate forward again.

The upshot is that this post might be a little more scattered than usual, since I'm going to be prone to thinking that I've already written something in the post's first incarnation. (I've switched over to Writely">Writely in order to write the rest of this, since I like its behavior better. It seemed silly to do so the first time, because I didn't think I was going to be writing so much.)

RSS back to normal

Tue, 15 Nov 2005 17:25:14 -0500

I've turned off the "only post excerpts" option, and returned to a full-text RSS feed. It was a good idea, I think, but I ended up getting fewer clickthroughs, which I suspect means that people wasn't realizing that there was more article on the site itself! Anyway, RSS aggregators should pick up the full text of posts again.

Thinking on Icons

Sun, 13 Nov 2005 18:03:20 -0500

I've been doing some thinking on Icons recently -- you may remember them from the distant past of this weblog, ten months ago -- specifically about how and when I should introduce them, and, more importantly, whether I should introduce them.

A Brief History of Frontier: Expanding the Colony, pt. 2

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 17:38:39 -0500

If the councillors from Duligne and Madera had angered the council, the ratification of Underwood's constitution made them utterly livid. The constitution established several states, each built around one of the cities of FFC1079; it also abolished the colonial council and created a Senate, to which each state's population directly elected representatives, of a number in proportion to the number of residents of that state. It also established, separate from the Senate, a Colonial President, who served as the Federation's satrap on FFC1079. Perhaps more offensive to the councillors was the provision for term limits on both the President and the Senators; a President was elected to four-year terms with a limit of two terms, and the Senators to two-year terms with a limit of three.

Meta: RSS Excerpts

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 08:24:20 -0500

Some of you have probably noticed that I've changed the way the RSS feed works - it now lists only the first 200 words or the Introduction, whichever ends first. Is that working for you guys? Do you prefer the full-text RSS feed?

(I note that I've made the change for purely selfish reasons - with a full-text RSS feed, people don't have to click through to the article itself unless they want to comment, so I don't get as accurate a view of who's actually seeing the articles. So I'm not horribly averse to changing back.)

A Brief History of Frontier: Expanding the Colony, pt. 1

Thu, 03 Nov 2005 18:24:04 -0500

(See this post for the history leading up to this point.)

Council President Marratt was the youngest member of the council when he was elected. He had arrived on Frontier as a child, and had inherited his position on the council after the death of his father, so many of the councillors had distrusted him at first. However, his natural charisma and progressive attitudes had won him friends among the council, and when he was elected to the position of council president, his primary aim was to expand the colony beyond Dodge City and Madera, the only official cities on FFC1079's map.

Frontier - The Calendar

Sun, 30 Oct 2005 17:48:15 -0500

One of the inevitabilities of colonizing alien planets is that any given planet is significantly unlikely to have rotational and revolutionary periods that coincide with the orthodox years and days. Eiluphates Gamma - that is, Federal Frontier Colony 1079 - is no exception to this, although its periods are much closer to the Federal measurements than some other colonies.

Odds and ends

Sun, 23 Oct 2005 10:45:29 -0500

I've been busy enough that I haven't been checking my referral stats as compulsively as I usually do, so I hadn't noticed that Aleae Iaciens is edging up on 1,000 pageviews! (That's right - 1,000 views in just over a year. Maybe if I were to post more often...)

So I have a couple of questions for you guys, since you all seem to be relatively on top of things.

First, what is a "gamist"? Ever since selentic linked to a few gaming weblogs, I've been seeing this word pop up; I assume it arises from The Forge, but I can't figure out what it means. Brian tells me that it's someone who falls between pure simulationist and pure narrativist, which terms I actually do understand, but I keep feeling like there are connotations to gamist that I'm just not getting.

Second, what do you all want to see me talk about? I honestly want answers here; I'm not just asking because I'm blocked. I think I have ten readers now (!!), and it behooves me to talk about the things that people want to read about. Should I work on the system more? (The more I think about it, the more I wonder if I shouldn't actually work out two systems for the game - one with cards, and one with dice. I like the card-based system, but it's not easy to get until you've played it through once or twice.) Should I keep talking about the history of Frontier, or should I talk more about where it is "today"?

Seriously - tell me what you want to see in this space, even if it's just "keep doing what you're doing" or "I don't have any suggestions, I'm just enjoying the ride" (or "you really should give up on Frontier and work on something else", although I'd like to hear why). And, as a reminder, if you're reading this from an RSS feed (like the Livejournal feed), I only see comments that are posted here, so please click through before you leave a note.

Okay, enough chatter for now. Barring overwhelming response as to what I should talk about, I'm working on a side piece about the geography of Frontier which should settle some questions that have been asked. With any luck I'll be posting that early this week, although with a midterm to study for and a paper to write, it probably won't be before Tuesday... (Some of you may also notice that the setting is changing as I nail more of it down; obviously, the more that gets nailed down, the less will be retconned. But if you have questions about that, or concerns that I've forgotten something I wrote earlier - hey, it happens - feel free to let me know.)

Sidebar: Insurrection?

Wed, 12 Oct 2005 21:33:54 -0500

That less than three quarters of the colonists did not leave Dodge City with the Separatists does not mean that the remaining population universally favored Michael Spader's policies - or his new militia. In fact, it is safe to say that most of them did not; the choice was not as simple as staying and agreeing with Spade or disagreeing with him and leaving, and within those colonists who stayed in Dodge City there was still a range of political opinions.

A Brief History of Frontier: The Separation War

Sat, 08 Oct 2005 11:21:47 -0500

Some of you, particularly Selentic, have asked about the details of the Separation War. I hope this provides some useful background and detail on this important part of Frontier's history.

It is worth noting that the Separation War is not merely significant in that it is the only real war ever fought on Frontier; it is also a turning point for the colonists. FFC1079 had, before this point, operated largely under the benign neglect of the Federal government. With the arrival and intervention of the Federal Police, however, the colonists began losing more and more autonomy to the Federal government, and a century later the Federales were pretty much running everything - which made it even harder to make the transition back to self-government when the Federal government disappeared in FY722.

A Brief History of Frontier: Part 1

Sun, 02 Oct 2005 13:30:01 -0500

A Brief History of Frontier

Frontier's recorded history begins four hundred and twenty-four years before the present, in the Federal Year 398, when a Federal probe ship discovered a solar system around the star Eiluphates, a yellow-white main sequence star orbited by five planets. Only one, initially designated Eiluphates Gamma, was capable of bearing life; two of its siblings were much smaller and closer to the sun, and the other two were distant gas giants, ten and thirty times farther from the star than Gamma. (There were large outer-belt objects, and two significant asteroid fields, but none were considered significant planets by the probe ship.) In FY407, a terraforming ship arrived in the Eiluphates system to begin operations on Gamma; its operations were largely limited to replacing the heavy carbon monoxide and ozone concentrations in the air with a breathable nitrogen-oxygen mix and to pre-populating the world with plants and animals. By FY585 the Federal Interior Commission was prepared to declare Eiluphates Gamma open for commission, renamed the planet Federal Frontier Colony 1079, and opened the system for colonization.