As I’m not a numbers person I rarely think about counting systems for worlds I’m building. In practice, when you're writing you don't often get into math. But if I was going to, the world of the Jokka would be a good target. So many of the Jokka I’ve written are either superlative organizers or impressive account-keepers... at least one was so good at business, it shaped the world, and another, in the recent novella, was actually making some of the first Jokku abacuses!
Despite this obvious opportunity, I didn’t think about number systems for them until I was drawing a clay tablet for the game and realized it needed scribbling on it. So I started scribbling. And once I started scribbling, I started thinking it through.
So here’s how the Jokka count, and how I walked through that process.
They have claws, which are great for making lines in clay (their first substrate for writing). So I went with the same kind of bars we’d find familiar: vertical swipes.
Then I thought about why a nomadic world might care about numbers, and that’s when I came up with animals. Because your wagons are pulled by them, and you have little goat-equivalents (the midena) for milk, and if you have more than a couple, you have to stop staking them down individually and build a corral.
So – 1-2-3-4 and then “pen them” for five by hooking a wall around them.
Note that I establish in the stories that Jokku writing is boustrophedon, which means it is read in a snake-like fashion: you read to the end of one line then immediately look down at the “end” of the second line and go backwards to the “front”. So numbers can be penned from the right or the left; it doesn’t matter which.
After you pen five animals, you need to build them serious shelter if you have more. So after that, you “roof” them for ten. That gets all ten of your fingers involved.
Then the abacus comes along, and “penning” and “roofing” becomes an indicator of the decimal place. Penning something multiplies its interior by five; roofing by ten. Housing a number (encircling it) moves it a decimal place further: “You need the whole abacus to calculate this number, roof, floor, and walls!”
This means there’s probably sayings based on math (“roof, floor, and walls” is probably one of them, and would mean something like “a ton of stuff” or “an overflowing bounty”). But the one thing I definitely caught is gestures: a thumbs-up for a Jokkad is “give me five of those”, while a palm either facing down or up can be “fill this” (give me ten). These gestures are holdovers from before the abacus, so they don’t indicate multipliers!
I had talked myself into an evolution of how people write and talk based on technology, at this point. (Which is cool, because that does happen.) And since I’m not planning to write any mathematicians, I probably won’t take it any further than this. But it was fun to get this far, and I’ve included, above, the sketchbook page where I doodled my way into this idea…!
And now, if you play the game, you know that the scratches on the tablets have meaning!
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/123-2019-42-ElementalJahir
Today's Wednesday Share is a little different... in this case, it's the first of a series, and you can see the other 6 pieces (plus a false start) linked from the annotation in the gallery. (Bonus: there's a link to another, similar series of Peltedverse Tarot images in the artist notes section).
I was inspired to do this one by the song Elemental from the Tears for Fears album. I was thinking of what the elemental symbols of each of the major Eldritch saga characters was, so I decided to chase them down. For instance, Jahir's has the unicorn, the amulet, the sword of state, the caduceus, and the net/spacetime of the seer!
If you're interested in seeing the rest of them, go check them out! Share your favorites if you feel like leaving a comment!
How wild is that? This one is fun because it's a "choose your champion" style competition between tea and coffee! And my daughter is participating to raise money for her college food budget with a design of her own! AND it will run through my birthday!
This might be more excitement than I can handle, honestly, lol. Anyway, come check it out!
Yes! Because tomorrow I am launching the kickstarter, so I don't want to clutter up your feed. So for your pleasure today, here is a color pencil piece from 26 years ago. Look at the water! And goodness, how hard I worked on those dark and forbidding cliffs. But I think my favorite thing is her hair, caught up in the jeweled caul.
I hope this one brings some beauty to the start of your week!
You can see it here on the gallery: https://mcahogarth.org/gallery/image/56-2000-055-NorthPoint
Today's short returns to the Le'enle for a comical urban fantasy published originally in Raconteur Press's Brim to the Dregs anthology. This was a potion-and-brew-themed call, and that made it a perfect fit for the Le'enle who have a special relationship with...
Well, just read on. XD
Returning to the freebies, here's the fantasy short I wrote for Raconteur Press's Goblin Market anthology. One of the things I love most about the Le'enle is that they're a meta-genre species: because they are immortal superbeings who choose to live among mortals, they are as at home in a scifi dystopia as they are in an urban fantasy as they are in a fairy tale. For this story, I chose to return to their medieval-fantasy-esque roots to tell a gentle story about magical inventory.
Okay, it's not about magical inventory. But I did have a lot of fun designing Prissa's potions, and I hope you enjoy reading about them.🧡
This one was originally published in Raconteur Press's anthology All Will Burn 3, the theme of which was "parents will do anything for their children." Most people went super-serious with that theme. I decided to go slapstick, and set this one in the Peltedverse. It's about the Guardkin, and eventually it will go in the Forecourt collection I'm planning. But for my locals supporters, here's your dose of fun for Friday!
