Pluvial Project

On 11th May I had an idea for a new project, which I've been working on quite solidly since. After quite some discussion, I eventually chose Pluvo as the name thereof. Cody has been working with me on site design, but apart from that I've chosen to be fairly secretive about it, because it'll be more interesting as quasi-usable cheesy shovelware than as pure vapourware. I've currently written 1,700 lines of code for it and 8,000 words of design documentation. There's lots of other ancillary material too.

The word pluvo is Esperanto for "rain", which you could derive from the words pluvius (rainy) and plovere (to rain) in Latin, and a little knowledge that the -o suffix in Esperanto denotes nouns. This sort of thing makes Esperanto almost a grammatically Analytical Language in its suffixes. For further example, -oj is for plural, -on for objects, and -ojn for plural objects. Given the nature of the project, I wanted it to have a modern looking logo, and asked Cody to come up with something that was a "P" and red. What he came up with it pretty darned stylish, looking a bit like a Rho, and we were able to incorporate it into quite a sleek design.

As well as this, I'm 17,000 words into a book of... well, dreck in places and some interesting stuff in others. I'll probably be self-publishing that if I get it up to the desired length. I've been struggling about what to call the book since very early on I came up with a definite name for it, but then I managed to come up with perhaps an even better name which I'm using as a kind of subtitle in the old Elizabethan style: e.g. along the lines of "Twelfth Night, or What You Will". Like that, though, I expect it'll often get abbreviated down to the first part of the title, which isn't really what I want to happen, so I've wondered about spelling the whole thing without the comma, except then it doesn't read as well semantically.

One of the nice things about these projects it that they give lots of scope for oversystematisation, and they lead me to wondering, for example, whether a torous plane can be folded in hyperdimensions such that the ring goes in both directions (I'm no topologist, otherwise I'd try to knit it). Generating project ideas isn't the problem—there are thousands of possibilities there—it's making one that's compelling enough to stick with, which for me usually means trying to make it broad and flexible. It also helps when my projects are interconnected to some extent, which my writing projects are very much lining up to be, though that then becomes a big classification problem as I try to decide which information best goes where, and what the focus should be.

It also means taking lots of notes about things, which I tend to scrawl anywhere and then find quite a while later to pick up the thread again; lots of strands scattered about, like pwdre ser or something.