I'm currently use scrivener to write and organize my books. I've seen World Anvil advertised a lot of some YouTube videos that I watch. It interests me but I was curious to know if anyone around here has used it or has any experience with it.
I'm currently use scrivener to write and organize my books. I've seen World Anvil advertised a lot of some YouTube videos that I watch. It interests me but I was curious to know if anyone around here has used it or has any experience with it.
I've never even heard of it. What sort of YouTube channels to you frequent?
Update: Ahh, it's a tool for creating RPG universes (including the infamous die-tables). As such, it's clearly a bit over the top for most authors (unless you're writing an RPG story). It certainly seems like overkill. Structure and plotting are good, but details world maps, individual character histories and entire neighborhoods seems a bit excessive.
On the advice on an interesting author suggestion, I started created character VOICE journals, detailing their personal histories (giving the characters a chance to express their personal 'voices' by talking about what most motivates them), but it was SO complicated, it practically sank the entire story and I'd left well over half of them incomplete. It (the Voice Journals) was an interesting idea, but not practical at all, and World Anvil is much more complicated than that!
I've never even heard of it. What sort of YouTube channels to you frequent?
I took a look at it. It looks kind of cool. It has tools for creating RPG campaigns as well as for authors doing books that require a lot of world building.
From what I could tell from the front page, it also has collaboration tools for both RPG campaigns and authors.
What sort of YouTube channels to you frequent?
Blacksmith's weekly?? They are probably banging on about it.
:)
Blacksmith's weekly?? They are probably banging on about it.
:)
Nope they are working on their horn and putting things in their hardie hole :)p
it's a tool for creating RPG universes
When I was in programming school, I first learned Assembler language (BAL). Then I learned COBOL, which of course is a higher level language. Then I learned RPG (not the RPG you're talking about), which is a very high level language. That was the only time I couldn't get a program I wrote to work. So even hearing those three letters causes me pain.
So even hearing those three letters causes me pain.
Hearing those three letters triggers some people's PTSD, too... (although I remember Robert Jordan's anecdote about actually detonating a RPG from a safe distance while it was in flight, as he was a door gunner and was already shooting at the guy who'd fired it, so he didn't have to traverse the gun much to hit it. it's just plausible enough that you can't quite file it as a total BS claim...)
Robert Jordan's anecdote about actually detonating a RPG from a safe distance while it was in flight, as he was a door gunner and was already shooting at the guy who'd fired it, so he didn't have to traverse the gun much to hit it. it's just plausible enough that you can't quite file it as a total BS claim...
A lot would depend on what they had as the door gun.
An M2, no way.
An M134 Minigun (at 6000 rounds per minute / 100 rounds per second), yeah, I'd buy that. It's not so much hitting the RPG rocket as creating a cloud/cone of bullets too dense for the rocket to penetrate.
If the gunner doesn't hit the warhead, the warhead will hit a bullet.
Get enough lead in the air between the RPG launcher and the target and it's not so far fetched.
So even hearing those three letters causes me pain.
As opposed to IBS? (Irritable Bowl Syndrome). But I became a programmer a bit later (less punch card (by hand) and more keyboard-created punch tapes), so in my day, the programs were all referred to as "Assembler" whichever machine it was one, as you were programming the actual source code of the actual Operating System. A real 'grunt level' coding, far removed from the usual programming languages.
A real 'grunt level' coding, far removed from the usual programming languages.
No, on the IBM 360 mainframe, BAL was a programming language (Basic Assembler Language). I think what you're talking about is Machine Language.
But BAL was very low level. It would take several programming statements in BAL to do what one statement in COBOL would do.
I recall when the optimizing of software was done by coders, and the c assembler was being worked on... there was a story how there was a lab where they were trying to reduce the assembly instructions for one structure in c, and they'd been improving it by reducing it one instruction at a time until it was like 34 lines of assembly... one day, people came in and the board had been wiped clean and it had something like 26 lines. (not sure of the exact numbers, but the improvement was that drastic)
But yeah, writing in assembly was always interesting. Writing in machine code, that was just a PITA.
Which reminds me of the programmer's reductio ad absurdum: "Every useful program has at least one unnecessary instruction and at least one bug. Therefore, every program can be reduced to one instruction, which will be wrong."
I was once going thru an Assembler program and came upon the following line of code:
drop dead
It was actually valid. The IBM 360 had 16 registers. Some were reserved. One was the base register for the program. And the others were usable by the programmer.
Core (not memory) was scarce so you had to squeeze in as much code as you could. One way was reusing core. There was something called a DSECT (I think it stood for data section) which was a file (buffer) where the fields in it were displacements to that register.
Let's say you used register 5 for a DSECT. I don't remember the commands, but you would refer to it a "5". Well, the 5 didn't show up in the cross-reference list that was used to debug the program. So BAL had an equate instruction called "EQU" (I think that's what it was). So you could give register 5 a name that would show up in the cross reference like:
R5 EQU 5
Now you referred to register 5 as R5 and it showed up in the cross reference.
Well, if you were done with that DSECT and wanted to reuse the core there was an instruction to drop the register (which dropped the DSECT). Once dropped you could use it for another DSECT. The command to drop register 5 that you named R5 was:
Drop R5
Everyone I knew named their registers as R5, R6, R7, etc.
And then I came upon a program where the register was named "dead".
dead EQU 5
So in that program, he dropped register 5 which was named "dead".
drop dead