What?

Pai Sho is a family of abstract strategy games. Fire Pai Sho relies some on luck, and Respite Pai Sho is a solitaire game. Both games can be played with a Skud Pai Sho set, for which you can get printable sets here.

Good question. I started with a single LibreOffice Writer document, then tried to organize things using CryptPad. It’s pretty similar to Google Docs, but not owned by Google. Different documents can link to one another.

Not long after that i tried Obsidian, and it’s ok but i like something easier to customize and share.

Now i use HTML, writing everything from scratch and using Neocities to host it. This makes pages pretty easy to present (i could just share the HTML files if i didn’t have a site host) and i have nigh unlimited options for how i want information to be displayed.

I’ve also briefly tried Fandom, but even with adblock their site is unpleasant to use.

I still use a single giant Writer document for unorganized notes and small ideas, but i organize things as i write them in HTML (or here).

Bantalsa (they call themselves /Β˥˦Ωː˥Ωˑ˩/¹) are plant people. Some really old ones will turn into trees kind of like Tolkien’s ents do, getting much slower and bigger instead of dying. These trees are called sithe (/siːθ/, their word is /Βː˥˦Ω˦˥Η/), and they grow nuts that fall and grow in the ground into young bantalsa over a period of several months. The sprouts (babies) uproot themselves when they’re ready and are raised by the community. Sprouts only photosynthesize and drink water for several more months until after their teeth come in.

Bantalsa who think they’re ready to become sithe will travel from their home village in a group of around 20. The one who expects to turn, usually the oldest, gets to decide where the group stops, but they don’t have any particular destination in mind when they set off. When the group finds a good place, the oldest picks one spot and stops moving. The rest of the group prepares to build a new village around the new sithe, since it’s important to them to be able to pass on their culture to the next generation.

Most bantalsa will not ever reproduce. They have no sex, but some have adopted gender after learning it from other peoples who do.

Ornad are birds, usually about 4 feet tall. Males are a little smaller than females and have brighter feathers, but that’s the extent of ornad sexual dimorphism. They’re monogamous and females lay clutches of 1-2 eggs during mating season every couple of years. Eggs are fertilized externally, and both parents take turns brooding. Healthy eggs hatch about 2 1/2 months after fertilization. Chicks can start feeding themselves after 3-4 weeks. Ornad are considered adults when they first fly, around age 15.

¹I plan to expand on their language once i have a better understanding of their phonology and anatomy. For that i’ll probably have to build a model of their vocal apparatus. Here capital beta /Β/ is a buzzing whistle, approximated by humans as a glottal whistle. Capital omega /Ω/ is a clear whistle. Capital eta /Η/ is a squeak. This notation is compatible with the IPA.

A little messy, but not too bad. I wonder if shading or coloring the lines for depth would make it easier to read.

Thanks for the answer. What tastes metallic to me is metal. Sometimes cutlery or metal mixing bowls.

The island shouldn’t ever land, and i have some plans for that already. I was actually thinking there would be towers and bridges leading up to the island (which is anchored in place), but airships would also have to be able to reach it. I think the inverse lightning rod would help with that. I was just planning to have regular lightning rods around the island, connected to the ground with chains. The people on the island would also go out of their way to keep it healthy, so it running out of water isn’t likely.

You’re right that a system for safe electrical equalization/decompression around the whole island wouldn’t be feasible, but maybe those could exist on docks, and trying to land just anywhere is more likely to pop your airship.

Maybe i’m just tired, but i did not find this very helpful, informative, relevant, or interesting. Thanks anyway, i’ll have another look once i’ve had some sleep.

That’s a point i hadn’t considered. I was planning to have at least one populated island and airships that travel to it, but now i know i’ll need to account for that in airship design. I wonder if an anchor or ground wire dragging on the ground would fix this.

Does this sort of thing cause problems on Earth with airplanes and zeppelins?

Neither am i, which is probably why my sport has some unconventional rules. It shouldn’t come up often, since hitting someone’s shield is totally legal.

I have Norgle, a ball sport based on a dream i had.

2-8 players (usually 6) split into two even teams. A referee is also present for formal games. Every player has the same equipment: A scoop, a thing like a giant ladle with a stick perpendicular to the handle about 1/4 of the handle’s length away from the cup; and a flat, round or oblong shield made of thick wires like the base of a disc golf basket.

The game is played in an oblong court, with a wall about 10 inches (25 cm) high along the short diameter to separate the teams. At the far ends of the court are the goals (rings about the size of a basketball hoop, elevated on poles to 8 or 9 feet (2.5 m) high), always one more on each side than each team’s number of players. So, 4 goals on each side in a standard 6 player game.

Players use the scoop like a tennis ball thrower or an atlatl to throw a ball through the goals, as well as to catch the ball. You can defend your goal by holding or throwing your shield in front of it, which has no effect on the score, or by catching the ball with your scoop, which grants you points. Using your shield like a racket to hit the ball is unconventional but legal.

Catching a ball in front of a goal is worth 2.5 points, and getting the ball though the other team’s goal is worth 10 points. Hitting a player with the ball costs you 2 points, unless that player was trying to block the ball with their body (instead of with their shield). A team wins by getting 30 points, and games are usually played as the best of 3 matches.

I haven’t played this in real life, mostly because i don’t have the equipment for it, so i’m sure it’s not very balanced yet.

My first thought is that an assistant could just push a cart with tools, while the doctor doesn’t move. Or people could wear slippers to walk without touching the ground.

At a glance, i already like the use of tags instead of just categories. Is this meant to succeed places like the CBB?

The clouds are just thick enough to block out sunlight, except on the tallest mountains and some very high flying islands. At the poles (not magnetic poles, but perpendicular to the sun’s rotation) you get months of sunlight or shade in summer or winter, respectively, a bit like Earth’s polar regions and their midnight sun. I haven’t put much thought into the clouds since i had the idea two years and a week ago.

The white hole is one of the things i handwave some details of. I think of it as a black hole moving backward in time, spewing out light and pushing matter away. This relies on the assumption that tachyons have negative mass, and objects with negative mass repel objects with positive mass (or at least attract them while moving backward in time, so it looks like a gravitational push to a forward-time observer). Why it only emits light and nothing else, i don’t know. The point of this is mostly that it acts as a reverse gravitational lens (or “gravitational snel” in my original notes).

Here, an observer (eye) can see an object (star) by looking right at it, or by looking almost straight up at the sun. The object would appear to be smeared across the sky, getting brighter and smaller closer to the sun. In practice it’s not quite that neat, as part of the world is always covered by clouds, and things that are really far away are hard to see in detail. But this is basically how the sky is distorted.

That’s neat. My day-night cycle is clouds that form on the side of the world where the sun isn’t. The sun itself is a white hole, so in addition to making light and heat it has a gravitational lens effect so it’s impossible to see the ground on the opposite side of it. I can elaborate on that if it doesn’t make sense.

My world is also the inner surface of a sphere with a light in the center. I considered the inside of a torus instead, but decided that would conflict with too many of my other ideas.

My world’s light source is a small sun that revolves once per day and bobs perpendicular to its rotation for summer and winter, up and down once each per year. I also have a second sun outside the sphere on an elliptical orbit, for longer periods of hot (near the planet) and cold (far), mostly to explain how geophysical heating and cooling make the surface expand and shrink to form mountains as an alternative to plate tectonics and volcanoes.

Just a couple.

Sekkite /sεkait/ or /sεkɪt/ is a powdery, light gray mineral that repels water. In large quantities it forms deserts, and it tastes very bitter and astringent if you eat it (which you should not do).

Obstinantium is a pretty generic indestructible fantasy metal. Its name is a play on stuff like adamantite. It looks pearlescent and thin layers are translucent.

Not long. I’ve been interested in it for years, but never wrote anything myself until less than 2 years ago when i started my current big project.

My love of some of the works that have inspired my stuff is much older, of course. I grew up on J. R. R. Tolkien and Douglas Adams, and various fairy tales and novels i only vaguely remember now.

Suppose the predators just eat other animals? I think if we found out pigs are sapient we wouldn’t stop eating cows and chickens. Is the predator species’ diet supposed to just be that one prey species?

I think this introduces your setting well. I liked the part about percussive maintenance.