Blog Updates
Anthologica Universe Atlas / Blog Updates

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Banknote Designing: What I Do

Ever since I moved to Germany with my family in 1996, I've always been fascinated by money. Especially the fact that there was money that was so different from US currency (at the time, Germany used the Mark) and that every country had their own. A natural progression, thus, was first collecting it... but then designing my own.

I remember first coming up with my own designs that weren't meant to imitate another country's money when I was about eleven or so. Part of me wishes I still had some of my old paper banknotes to scan and show, but, alas, after my family moved back in 2010, I think they're languishing somewhere in the bottom of a box. On the other hand, though, I decided to move my efforts to the computer in about 2009 or so using a program called Paint.NET. First results were rather tragic, but I decided to keep at it and keep working.

The first design that I was "comfortable" with was partly thanks to a solicitation for pictures I made on another forum to which I belong.

TLF%20200%20Front%20and%20Back.png
Problem with this one? For starters, I didn't have a scanner (or easy access to one), so the writing looks very clearly computer-like. Also, the resolution was only about 100 dpi, so the detail's a bit lacking. So, about two years later or so (around the time I left France, I think), I decided to clean it up and revise it: higher resolution, more detail, and the like as part of a revision project for all of my banknotes.

TLF%20200%20New%20B-Compressed.png
Looks better, at least in my view. But time progresses and I recently decided to revise it yet again, largely because I was revising the smaller notes. (More on that later.) Part of it was after seeing even more money, paying attention to the details on it, and coming up with some new ideas for how to render the images and work with things (plus some extra security stuff).

TLF%20200%20New%203-C.png
This works a lot better, at least in my view: for one, it's cleaner. I switched the font to Corbel because, to me, it looked a lot crisper and more appropriate for banknotes than the old font (Trebuchet) and it additionally could render some of the characters Telèmor has that Trebuchet doesn't possess (namely, the s- and t-comma). Also, in the interim, I got a bit better with underprint and patterns of that sort, so I figured their incorporation would only be positive.

Over the course of the next weeks, there may be more in this series, though I'm not sure what to cover or if a tutorial should come at some point. We'll see, though.
bloodbath, Ph.D. read more (3 comments) · 9 years ago

Kala glyphs

masako 9 years ago

So...

I found this place...
masako read more (1 comment) · 9 years ago

A Creation Story

This is still basically a rough draft. It needs some polish around the edges, and also names. I wrote this primarily for an upcoming tabletop campaign, so it is unlikely to be used for my conworld, but I figure it might make for some good translation anyway, which is what I am going to do with it. If you want to translate it, feel free to paste some names in yourself. Makes it more interesting. (…)
Hallow XIII read more (3739 bytes) · 9 years ago

Religion and Mythology

Religion



The underlying principle of Rireinu society is ñi, which has been variously translated as propriety, social order, hierarchy, or religion.  (…)
Rireinuverse read more (2 comments, 437 bytes) · 9 years ago

Culture: An overview

General



Functionally Rireinu is a single-sex society. Everyone has the same rights and the same duties. Everyone gets conscripted into the military. Everyone is expected to have children. In many ways, you are not considered to be a full adult until you are a soldier (or sailor) and a mother.

The first thing most people notice is that Rireinukave don't wear any clothes. This is partly a result
(…)
Rireinuverse read more (346 bytes) · 9 years ago

History of Rireinu in a nutshell

History



In the beginning, (…)
Rireinuverse read more (628 bytes) · 9 years ago

Thus Ends Spring

A lot of things have happened this past month—Anthologica passed 2000 forum posts, 50 registered users, and 8000 words! For those of you who don't regularly peruse the forums in detail, here's a summary of some of the things that have been going on, both in the community and in site development. (…)
News read more (106 comments, 2354 bytes) · 9 years ago

You Wouldn't Pirate A Jetpack

If you strip down all the modern complications, economy can be summed with this simple premise: We have what the other people want and the other people have what we want

Even human with their allegedly post-scarcity society works under this premise. Though their manufacturing technology allows them to make literally everything, they still need two things: Energy and Instructions.

Energy is freely available to all humans (with some exception such as criminals). Central Authority granted some amount of daily energy to those who are eligible. A moderate usage would only use half of this ration, allowing them to accumulate their energies for creating more elaborate objects in the future.

Now, here's where thing gets complicated. Instructions for some objects like food and clothes are available everywhere for free. Many other instructions, however, requires you to pay to the Instruction Owner (in form of energies obviously). Since you are basically buying the right to make a copy of the object, the payment is called "copyright fee".

So you must be wondering, "What stopped other humans from getting an instruction, duplicate it and give them to other people?

You see, a lot of human made objects have what it's called "signatures" in it. The details and the technology behind it is beyond me, but a signature basically prevents you from using other people devices. Of course, there are some naughty humans who tried to get around this limitation. However, the Instruction Owners always came up with another scheme to counter them.

You should be careful when you're making an object using a pirated instruction. Some of them have been tampered and can injure you.
Yaali Annar read more (1 comment) · 9 years ago

Srs Bzns

Yes, I have a Universe! That means anything serious will be moved there. I am hoping this will let me overcome my lethargy/fear of imperfection and post my little ideas here because God my conworlding is all just theoretical I need to fix that.

Now to do things.
Hallow XIII read more (403 comments) · 9 years ago

Toward an alternate history

...in which Pembrish is spoken in Wales, which is ruled by Scotland; the Vikings speak an Ingvaeonic language; and Mercia remains independent from the rest of Britain, and ruled by the French.

There are three points of divergence. First: the Saxons expand north into western Scandinavia; second, speakers of the West Saxon dialect of Old English expand into Wales to escape the Norman Conquest; third, the Tangut Empire does not collapse into incompetence, but instead expands under Renghis and his successor, bringing the Black Death to Europe about a hundred years earlier.

Ingvaeonic dominance of western Scandinavia creates closer ties to Scotland (which here means the Germanic-speaking part of Britain, distinct from Mercia, the Romance-speaking part), leading to its eventual entry into the Kalmar Union, which is not an alliance against the Germans but a mutual defense treaty between the Saxons and the Scots preventing northward expansion by both the Germans and the Mercians. Similarly, France retains closer ties to Mercia.

I am not really sure what happens after that. The Middle Ages are hard.

But, to guess: Mercia becomes a merchant state, with London taking on the same role it does today. Belgium may or may not exist, but Mercia gets the Congo. The advance of the disorder brought on by the Black Death means that the Spanish don't get to North America right after the collapse of the civilizations there. They take a few islands and then get their asses kicked, but New World diseases probably still spread. France might take South America; I'm not sure how different North America would be, since it would probably be claimed by Scotland and settled mostly by Irish and Germans. The War of Secession might become a proxy war between Scotland and France/Mercia; whatever happens, the Confederacy, of course, wins.

Assuming the World Wars still happen roughly as they did in our timeline (and I don't think Eastern Europe would look all that different), something something Manchuria. The Treaty of Versailles (assuming ~WWI doesn't go differently, but I'm not sure what North America would look like yet — that is, who's in the Union and who's in the Confederacy) would be complicated by Mercian merchant pillaging, which would probably piss off Germany even more, whatever Germany ends up looking like.

Absence of England means absence of English philosophy, which means the empires probably do not blow up as easily as they did in our timeline, and the early-20th-century left looks very different. I am not sure what consequences this would have.
Nortaneous 9 years ago

Rireinu: An Introduction

Foreword



Greetings! We hope you come in peace. If you do, Rireinu has much to offer you: history, nature, culture, trade. And right here is where you can read all about it.
(…)
Rireinuverse read more (2 comments, 6820 bytes) · 9 years ago

Sneak Peek!

škəθāt pṝan̪ n̪ewāṇ xōšcərɨ məŋə̄ṣṛ kəruhewə̄ṇe
kɨṛuwāyenɨ ɨ̄xēṣṭ θēpaširɨ tə̄ṇāṇ ṝmɨ̄rɨ pōwṝ ṭṛðaṭ
ṣoxɨhe ṝwas ŋə̄hūṣ mowɨyāy t̪ə̄kṣəθɨ šňəwɨ̄s
Hallow XIII read more (1 comment) · 9 years ago

Pages Meant for Reading

I have an admission: I had no idea what to do with the site's front page for the longest time.

But hey, now I do!

The old one is archived here. Feel free to contribute conworld-related "Did you know?" facts on the Trivia page. A forum thread will be added soon for nominating featured articles/universe/languages/etc.
News read more (15 comments) · 9 years ago

Trivia

Add a comment here (or click the "comment" link on this post) to create a new trivia factoid. Submissions should be brief, relate to your conworld or conlang, and provide at least one link back to source material (preferably, but not necessarily, hosted here on Anthologica.) The best facts for trivia are those that are either amusing, unusual, or might entice other authors interested in the same thing to read the link material and become inspired. Look to Wikipedia's "Did you know?" section for further inspirations on style and substance.
Anthologica Universe Atlas read more (38 comments) · 9 years ago

A Short Impression of Proto-Jalvic

Man I should stop advertising things.

Proto-Jalvic, as I currently envision it, was a moderately synthetic, agglutinative language with features that, while not perhaps commonplace among the world's languages, aren't anything particularly exceptional either.

I am not going to lie here: I don't have a very concrete idea of what I want this to be like, so expect several postings documenting my vain attempts to come up with something useful. (…)
Hallow XIII read more (2506 bytes) · 9 years ago

A selection from the grammar of my first conlang.

It is pretty bad.
(…)
Nortaneous read more (204 comments, 4225 bytes) · 9 years ago

On the Jalvic Languages

Nevermind anything, this is what I've been thinking about recently so this is what you're going to get.

The Jalvic languages are a family of languages spoken in the West of some continent in my world which I can't provide any details for. Prominent features include a large ratio of POA to MOA contrasts for both consonants and vowels, a generally agglutinative morphology (although the degree of synthesis falls pretty low on the one end of the continuum, but I can't attach any geographic term to this end because I haven't the faintest idea) as well as, um, I don't know. As far as the conworld is concerned it is one of the older and bigger language familes, although it is not supposed to be incredibly monumental in either spread or age.

The (external) history of the Jalvic languages started back in my young and innocent days when I had freshly entered high school, and for the first time discovered Tolkien. I had at this point already a lot of Latin and Ancient Greek under my belt, and when I read about Quenya I was inspired to make my own language. This language, although its original form no longer exists, was named Jalvaan (…)
Hallow XIII read more (2 comments, 2970 bytes) · 9 years ago

The Unboxing

This is the official inauguration of my blog, which I intend to use as a commonplace book of sorts: all my little thoughts about conlanging, conworlding and by association various sciences as well as RPG design will be put here.

Things that become big enough will be specially dealt with in forum threads, and eventually receive a place in my Universe. That is, once I have one. I'm already stuck trying to figure out what to call it! But, well, that's what this is for, innit?

Comments are welcome, especially critical ones. "u suck" is a valid comment but I reserve my right to ban people from commenting who do not make up for their rudeness with anything else.

Next up: idk whatever I might think of
Hallow XIII 9 years ago

The "Inadvisable Sunday-Night Update" Update!

Featuring:

1. Dictionary categories are now called tags. This should prevent them from being confused with lexical categories, particularly since it's advisable to create a tag for each category.

2. A number of dictionary features were cluttering up the mode bar. Dictionaries are, by far, the most complex and featureful things currently on the site. Several features have been moved into a special "tools" page, which has been augmented additionally with quick access to the importer and flash cards. (Also the hidden "printable" mode is included.)

3. Emoticons! go check 'em out! Also remember to set your colour of preference!

4. Pronunciation field. I've had 3 or 4 requests for this. While I wanted to wait for the SCA to be implemented before adding it (since, in theory, the pronunciation for most words would be regularly derivable from the headword form), there's no reason you should have to wait if you already have them written down.
News 9 years ago

Recent downtime

Hi folks! Sorry we were offline for the last day or so; there was a security concern with our hosting arrangements that required some unscheduled maintenance to resolve. But all is better now, and things should be (and stay) nice and cosy.

I'll be adding more convenient data backup and download features soon to cushion things in the event of any future server issues.
News 9 years ago

Hierarchical URL aliases!

The site has always had three ways of accessing pages: /?title, /?id=id, and /?page=title. The id addressing mode isn't very friendly, and the title addressing modes are unreliable—the page with the lowest ID number gets linked, so a title link can really only be used once.

But no longer! We now have hierarchical addresses, where you use slashes to separate multiple page names! So now you can be sure that you always link to the right thing. The first segment of the path is always resolved the old way, but after that it looks for child pages, so you can reference dictionary entries etc. readily and unambiguously.

Also: the question mark can now be left out! So you can link to anthologi.ca/users/testament directly, using the syntax [/users/testament|anthologi.ca/users/testament].
News 9 years ago

The Horror...

The following is the grammar section of the earliest version of the Drydic Language, my first conlang which wasn't basically an English relex. Instead, it's a Latin relex trying to pretend it isn't! (…)
Nessari read more (4826 bytes) · 9 years ago

Information on Proto-Søkkli-speaking society

This is some information for the sake of outsiders, albeit in Proto-Søkkli, about Proto-Søkkli-speaking society:

Sokkla søkkli réśide.
sɔkːlSokli_people.NOM-aNOM.SG sœkːlProto-Søkkli.ACC-iACC.SG respeak-ɕiACC.3SG.A-ðɛNOM.3SG.A
The Sokli people speak Proto-Søkkli. (…)
Travis B. read more (3726 bytes) · 9 years ago

Şerau Teršelainja*

An essay written by Meihou Ianoutsé, one of the brightest lights of Anaşali literature, detailing her feelings and thoughts about the capture and subsequent treatment of Teršelai, a Ker Salanjan city-state.
*Now playing on Rockway! New home of Şerau Teršelainja here.
Nessari 10 years ago
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