User:Kilyle

From Charas Project

Current revision as of 11:14, 22 April 2007

Because one language is never enough.

Quick Resource Links

Just in case it's what you're here for, these are the resources I created myself:

RTP Children Edits: http://www.geocities.com/kilyle.geo/Craft/Games/Resources/RTPKids.htm

More information on my programming and editing can be found near the bottom of this page.

Contributions to Charas Wiki

So far, I created the Chipsets page and the Character Sets page. I hope to do more when I can make the time and find a subject I'm familiar with.

And now, on to information about me:

Kilyle

When I joined the internet, I chose the ident Kilyle because it was the first one I came up with that didn't require a fudge--or a number. Since then, I've learned that few if any people actually know who Kilyle is. He's my favorite character from a Star Trek novel (Final Frontier by Diane Carey): a Rihannsu (Romulan) who interacted with George Samuel Kirk (father of James Tiberius Kirk) during an incident in the Neutral Zone involving the Enterprise back before it even had a name. His full name is t'Cael Zaniidor Kilyle, and this unique ident has served me well all the years I've been online.

Another favorite character who seems to be not well known is Alliar (from Josepha Sherman's A Strange and Ancient Name). He's a wind spirit trapped in mortal flesh, capable of changing his form but incapable of freeing himself to become one with the wind once more. He's technically genderless, and knows nothing of "flesh games" (as he calls it). I made two characters on WoW based on him, but they are both female elves, since I can't see his character as having the male elf muscles, and anyway, at one point in the book he does shift into a female form for a moment. He's completely claustrophobic, and my characters stay true to that--which means I can't even enter Ironforge (giant cave!!) or Loch Modan (since I'd have to go through tunnels to get there).

The Real Me

My name is Alethia (Greek for truth). I was born in 1978 (making 78 my favorite number, and 7 + 8 the first numbers I learned to add instantly). I live in Washington State.

Education

I was homeschooled through my late teens (best thing my mom ever did for me), at which point my great uncle decided that I should be in college, and sent me a check. I said, "It's your money," and signed up at the nearby community college. I was a bit nervous because I wasn't used to a classroom environment, but I took 18 credits (get my money's worth! 18 credits cost the same as 10) in Japanese, Math, Computer Programming (VB), and Study Skills. I maintained a very high GPA (3.91 I think at last count) over six years, with B as my lowest grade. I finally graduated with two degrees: Associate of Arts and Sciences and Associate of Fine Arts (Written Arts).

Over my six years, I studied languages (two years of Japanese first, then audited the rest: ASL, French, German, and Italian), computer programming (one year each VB and C++) math (through Calculus), literature and writing (lots!), art (mostly drawing), acting (I'll stick to writing the plays), and psychology (wish I could've taken more than one class in that). I was a member of Phi Theta Kappa and the Nippon Friendship Club, and started the Theatre Club (we had three members the first year, but I secured funding for the next year, at which point the club became more popular, but I was no longer President).

College revved me up, but I was already in love with learning anyway. I enjoyed most of my heavy course load and worked on side projects for many of my classes. I also managed to work elves into the final projects of quite a number of my classes, including art, programming, and psychology.

Interests

I'm a language buff, as a later section of this page goes into far more detail on. I also enjoy computer languages and conlanging. I'm a writer, insofar as I have always conceived of myself as eventually writing something significant to give to the world. Insofar as I actually write on a regular basis, no, I'm not a writer. I work in spurts and have numerous projects always on the back burner. The evil Procrastitron does not like me to actually get work done, and I'm afraid I bow to his will more often than not.

I enjoy a wide variety of written works, including Young Adult fantasy and sci-fi, textbooks (languages and writing), comic books, comic strips, web comics (latest favorite: Girl Genius), plays, screenplays, and poetry. I also enjoy disecting good literature until it's a barely recognizable pile of guts on the table. That is, I love sites like The Sugar Quill (for discussing Harry Potter) and Tea at the Ford (for discussing Buffy the Vampire Slayer). I was in heaven the other day when a friend and I spent something like four hours just discussing the history of classical literature across various cultural and linguistic boundaries (the discussion was so good that I stopped playing Guitar Hero 2 (which my friend just got, and for which I have waited for months)).

My favorite TV program at the moment is Criminal Minds, and it's basically the only program that I consistently watch. I adore Dr. Spencer Reid and find Garcia hilarious. My favorite part about the series so far is that they act like a close-knit family and aren't afraid to tease each other; it's basically the sort of family I grew up in. The idea that the team can act as a family, willing to die for each other if need be, is, I think, the secret behind the success of Star Trek (among other shows), and I wish more people in Hollywood would pay attention to it, because I can't stand the string of writers who seem to think that a movie lacks conflict if the team members aren't at each other's throats (or trying to stab each other in the back).

I skate on inlines, and just tonight got back to the rink after about two and a half years of not skating at all. The skills came back pretty fast, which pleased me. I even managed a few steady spirals near the end of session (they're one-leg moves where you put your other leg straight out behind you... at least, the way I do it; the alternative is basically doing the splits in mid-air). My three-year-old nephew is skating now and I hope to go skating with him quite often.

Programming

I can program in Visual Basic and C++, although I haven't done so for a while. I grew up with GW-Basic and Q Basic, so VB was only a small leap and I expect that I'll have the basic programming down in my head for the rest of my life, but C++ is a bit more recent and I'll need a refresher course before I do anything serious with it.

I enjoy some of the aspects of RPG Maker, including its autotiles and the fact that many of the basic RPG interactions are already present (such as talking to other characters and dealing with items and inventory). However, at the moment, I prefer Mark Overmars's Game Maker. For making non-RPG games, it's not as cluttered, and I'm more used to it than I am to RPG Maker. Plus, of course, it's free (unlike XP) and legal (unlike previous RPG Makers). It even has a particle engine for making rain, snow, fireworks, and the like (okay, that one I had to register for). I'm currently teaching a friend to program with Game Maker, and we're up to the level of Frogger. Hope to do Tetris soon.

Resources

I'm decent with recolors and certain types of edits. I have done edits of the RTP children, and plan to do more. I've tried to recolor facesets, but they're not as easy.

I'm also working on ripping chipsets from Dragon Warrior III, Dragon Warrior IV, and Ultima: Quest of the Avatar, none of which seem to be readily available when I've looked for them online.

Any links to my resources are at the top of this page.

The Never-ending Search

I at one point encountered a marvelous page of original resources for RPG Maker. These included charsets of American Indians, Japanese schoolgirls, guys in togas, people from the slums, knights on horses, crawling babies, and so on. The characters were of a distinct style (odd number of pixels, for one, and the clothes were far more realistic than the RTP set). I will probably (eventually) post one of their charsets on my page and link to it so you can see what I mean.

Anyway, I have long hunted for this page, and can't find it. Either it's gone down or I'm just not looking in the right place (or with the right words). I desperately want to find this page. I want to thank them for putting so much time and effort into such beautiful charsets, and I want to find out whether I can use them in a game and how to properly attribute their maker. Furthermore, I have seen these on occasion in other collections, and I want to find out if they are supposed to be there or if I should inform someone that they're unauthorized (a resource designer this good deserves respect).

If you have any information about this page, and especially a link to it or the concrete information that the site has gone down, please let me know!

Gengo (Language!)

I'm a total language buff with an extensive history of language studies, none of which have yet made it to fluency; I'm not interested in pointless fluency. My general pursuit is to understand the principles behind a wide variety of languages, especially the grammar and interesting vocabulary distinctions (such as the wide variety of colors in Hawaiian, the distinction between hot and cold water in Japanese, the deferential verbs in some languages, the family member distinctions, the body part distinctions, and so on). In part, this allows me to better understand the subject as it pertains to a wide variety of specific instances. In part, it should allow me to at some point pick up a language that I have studied the basics of, and move into fluency with comparative ease.

Statistics (of sorts)

Native Language: American English

My "First Language": Japanese

The First Language I Ever Studied: French

Currently Studying: Spanish

Recently Dabbled In: Romani (Gipsy) and Basque

Likely to Be Soon Studying (Not for the First Time): Russian and Irish

Languages I Have Taken Classes In: Japanese, French, Italian, ASL, German

Languages I Can Piece Through (with a comparative passage in another (non-English) language, or a dictionary): Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, Esperanto

Languages I Can Read but Lack the Grammar and Vocabulary for: Greek, Russian, Arabic (I've forgotten most of the Korean I at one point studied)

Languages I Was at Some Point Interested in: Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Vietnamese, Korean, Chinese (Mandarin), Fijian, Hawaiian, Tagalog, Yiddish, Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Manx, Basque... (this list is non-exhaustive)

Most Irritating Languages: French and the Gaelics, mostly for reasons of their spelling not in any sense matching their pronunciation. And yes, I do support the Simplified Spelling Society's goal of eliminating such problems in English. And yes, I realize that this is <a href="http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html">a difficult undertaking</a>. Perhaps <a href="http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ortho.html">impossible</a>. Anyway, French and Irish have their appeal for me, so even though they're irritating, I continue to study them. But if we ever get into a conversation about languages, you'll hear me harp on French.

Quirkiest Language Goal: I intend to someday learn a click language. Or at least part of one. Even being able to make those sounds would be sweeeeeeet.

Conlanging

In the fine tradition of Dr. Zamenhof, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Marc Okrand, I am a conlanger. That is, I create my own languages. (If you don't see the merit in this activity, I feel sorry for you, but I'm not going to try to convince you.) I hope to someday read Hamlet in the original Klingon (a minor goal of mine, not likely to be realized). I have studied Tolkien's writing systems and read passages of the Bible in Esperanto. I appreciate some of the principles behind such attempts as Láadan, and I enjoy the atmosphere from even a smattering of conlang in a fictional work, such as Lapine (rabbit language from Watership Down) or the Geisterdammen tongue in Girl Genius.

On the other hand, I abhor the English alphabet insofar as it lacks several symbols for vowels (and for a few consonants) while retaining four unnecessary letters (c, x, q, and j). For this reason alone, I have decidedly not studied Ido. And any language I work on starts with a basic understanding that I will use something resembling a sane spelling system. With the exception of Elite Elven, in which I plan to pour out my annoyance at the French language by making Elite Elven spelling as obtuse as possible. Possibly unreadable.

Other conlang pursuits include the following (listed by the race I based them on, although that's not likely to be exactly the race they finally end up with... that is, for example, my dwarves will eventually be called a different name, and likely will be distinct from what are in English called "dwarves").

Faerie: Based on Hawaiian, because I figure anything in the CVCVCVCV format has got to be either cute or annoying, and that fits faeries to a T.

Ogre: Based on principles gleaned from isolation languages such as Chinese and from what I understand of ASL, Ogre is a strongly gestural language with a structure of the sort "You go Seattle this day, get present bring me please please."

Dwarven: Strong verb changes (sing/sang/sung kinda thing), plenty of plosives and nasals, and the only conlang of mine so far that allows a plosive to end a word. Also, these dwarves live underground, and have no vocabulary for overworld items, except a rudimentary vocabulary spoken only by the women, who go aboveground to gather food. This "hunter dialect" is not spoken or understood by most of the men.

Gnomish: Irish-like lilt with a trilled R and an urgency to the conveyance of vital information (since they're constantly on edge about danger, like meerkats). They have an extensive locative system (prepositions, basically) and a set of verbs with inherent location/direction information, as well as a set of verbs and adjectives specifically regarding predators, for which no subject need be stated (e.g., "Outside cave [it is] hunting-along-ground" with a verb that conveys the information of a large cat-like creature).

Elven: I have half a dozen at least, some of which are interrelated. Classical Elven is the Elven Latin, from which sprang Elite Elven (my most deliberately hideous language, insofar as spelling goes, and with a far more exacting conjugation list than any other) and Morudan (Wood-speech). Morudan's about abandoning a number of categories from Classical Elven, and borrowing some simpler forms from Dwarven (such as a preceeding simple negative, roughly switching "hunt-nai" to "no hunt"). There's also Finogre, a hybrid language from when a group of elves joined a group of ogres and formed a community (my "ogres" are far pleasanter than any ogres you've ever heard of), and Tatha (it means "soft, pleasant, mild, friendly" or a general concept thereof), which has an exhaustive supply of adjectives (such as "niffa," meaning "windborne" or something light enough to be carried by the wind, like a seed from a dandelion--and a group of adjectives describing size, among which is a specific word meaning "handheld" or about the size of an orange).

Hanlo: This is my human language, and possibly the only one in which I allow an H (aside from, I think, Faerie). I kind of dump bits here, anything that I am interested in but doesn't fit with my other language concepts. I'm vaguely patterning this after samurai culture.

I also have a language I'm designing for young children to learn before they speak English, in which the words they'll need to use are paired with the sounds they're capable of and the word structures they're first able to pronounce. Thus, the most basic verbs follow the CVCi format (like the words "doggy" and "baby"), and the most basic nouns and adjectives follow a similar CVCV format. My general hypothesis, after all I've read, is that a child is best served by you conducting a proper conversation with him as early as possible, and this language should allow you to do that. My hypothesis is a lot more detailed than that, but I won't go into it here.

My conlangs are by no means finished; most likely most of them will never even approach that goal. I am lazily collecting bits and bobs as I go, and now and then I make a few quick strokes toward my goal. I'm in no hurry.