Charn vies with Tashbaan as my favorite Narnian fantasy setting. Not that I’d want to live there, of course. It’s dead, dry, and spooky. But Charn in its prime… well! It must have been something to see. One of the reasons it’s so evocative is the name. It’s short and blunt, like a location of …
In last weeks’ Worldbuilding Wednesday I took a look at the etymology of Prunaprismia and how other women of Telmar might have been named. This week, I’ll look at the men. I think Lewis designed his names with French and Spanish in mind. The pronunciation of them, glottal and oily, recalls spoken Italian as …
One of the most oddly named characters in the whole of Narnia is Queen Prunaprismia, the wife of King Miraz. In Prince Caspian Miraz murders his brother, Caspian’s father, and usurps the kingdom, but keeps Caspian as his heir because he has no progeny of his own. But when his wife Prunaprismia becomes pregnant, Caspian …
Among the more well-known of military slang words are snafu and FUBAR. Both originated in WWII. Snafu has since passed into regular language use as a noun meaning a mess, an unexpected monkey wrench thrown into one’s plans. Originally SNAFU, the letters stood for Status Nominal: All Fucked Up, a sarcastic term referring to the …
Military slang is obscure and puzzling even at the best of times. It’s easy for civilians to pick up terms readily bandied about by journalists like MREs (military rations) and those from TV shows and movies, like dogtag and grunt. But there’s a whole slew of others, some dependent on location, like AWACS (Airborne Early …
Potions are essential for RPG fantasy gaming. They’re like a Get Out of Jail Free card, useful for a player in dire circumstances to cheat fate by teleporting themselves away from a foe or healing fatal damage. But they can also do other things. From my twitter feed, some favorites I created. “Potion” refers to …
Talktotransformer is proving to be a potent tool for me. I usually have to run things through a few times, and fine-tune and collate the results, but am mostly assured of a fecund list. By which I mean a list that makes the mind wander, cooking up possibilities (and story ideas) for people, places, and …
I’ve been working with random generation (courtesy of Gammadyne’s Random Word Generator) for almost three years now, and have to say it’s a nifty tool for generating both imaginary languages and imaginary names for people, places, and things. But now there’s another way to generate the latter: neural networks. A neural network, basically, is a …
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