On What I Do

"So," you may be given to wondering, between living your empty life filled only with vaguely amusing internet content and religiously reading this blog, "aside from his lucrative career making free rpgs, what does Stinja do with his time?"

Well, thanks for asking. Because I'm now going to tell you. (Those of you who weren't really wondering that now groan, gird* themselves, and prepare for a rambling tale, but shush, this is my blog, not yours).

Technically speaking, of course, your humble Stinja is a student. Despite being hudreds of years old, to maintain his façade, he occaisionally has to attend a school. Currently, he's gone in fro Grinnell College. But, as I recently figured, that only actually takes up 17.5 hours of my time a week. And homework amounts to roughly another eight a week, with another 3.5 for the weekends.

Extracurriculars take another four hours a week. Given that I sleep on average eight hours a night on weekdays and ten on weekends, and take a total of about three hours for meals a day, that leaves me with 29.4 hours of free time during the week and 18.5 on the weekends.

Besides the fifteen minutes that breakdown took me**, how do I spend my time? That's a good question! Mainly I try strange things and see if they work. I brainstorm games that will probably never be completed. I plot revisions of existing games. I bang my head against various (metaphorical! sheesh.) walls of my own devising. I draw, and stuff.

Sometimes I watch Glee.

(Don't look at me like that. I find it hilarious in its inability to even vaguely approximate reality. You'd probably judge me for enjoying the first four or five seasons of stargate sg-1, too. Shoo.)

I listen to music and read the internet. I get overambitious with projects. I program. I chat with friends over the internet.

"But why, Stinja," you ask, still puzzled, "have you chosen to answer my question with such a bizarre non-answer? Seriously, if you're going to answer a question like that, you should at least be able to provide an example of something you're doing."

Aha! You, dear reader, if you really did think that, fell into my brilliantly planned rhetorical trap! Because it just so happens that I do have something I'm working on!

I am attempting to write a computer program to randomly generate entire languages!

There, look at my genius sine application. Well, I suppose you could use it for a really baller version of the one-time-use-pad-code. But still. Anyway. This project has required me to learn mor than I probably would have otherwise about linguistic typology, linguistic universals, parametric variation, and python (my language of choice).

So far, I can randomly generate a language's morphological Type (Isolating, Inflected, Agglutinating, Polysynthetic). Hopefully before too long I will be able to generate Morphosyntactic Alignment (Nominative-Accusative, Absolutive-Ergative, Transitive, Direct, Tripartite, Phillipine, Active, Split Ergative and a host of other goodies). From there it's a short step indeed to Case, Adpositions, Semantic Distinctions, Lexical Categories, and Agreement.

Once all of the Parameters are effectively varried, I'll work out a system to generate a working Phrase Structure Grammar to arrange the words. Then comes the random Phonology and Phonotactic system program, and from there the random word generator to populate the lexicon.

So yeah.

Put some pants on,
-Stinja

*It's a word. Look it up.

**Note: did I say anything about my obsessive blog updating? Sorry about that, reader.