Very, very pleased to kick off a six part Nightlight thingamajig for you here on the site, while we attempt to take vacations which overlap somewhat-but-not-really. He is going to Gjalladhall, the “Place of Elder Songs,” where he will attempt to set an old question of lineage to rest. I will be drunk in Scotland. I’m not leaving yet, though; you gotta put up with me for a couple more days. I have to take a moment to honor my cohort for his work on this series, I legitimately don’t know where it came from. Grace’s geometric hair is my favorite thing about the set, though you might find something else to like before it’s over. This is all part and parcel of a ton of secret Nightlight work that would legitimately freak you out if you knew it.

I know a lot of people who make games, and some of them I know well enough to ask what I would describe as “rude questions.” Or, there’s just things that I want to know. I’ve never been able to figure out where the line is, and my wanting to know feels very much like needing to know, so I run aground on this all the time. I sent a few of these out, and they run the range, so the ones that will still talk to me will get theirs posted over the next week or so in this space.

I’ve been overjoyed to see people decoding that Clickwise bit I mentioned over the last couple days. Because it’s mostly a substitution cipher you can get at most of it, the challenge is (of course) that you don’t have access to the full symbol set. I saw a really cool piece that broke down the Known stuff in the Clocktalk dialect of Clickwise, and the writer lamented that he was not able to write his own name because he didn’t know how to write J. Well, I can’t let something like that go. Here:

My original draft for it mapped things to phonemes and not letters, which I thought was cool, but it seemed like making it a cipher would allow it to be more functional for you, if you ever wanted to play with it, while leaving its cultural payload intact. I thought of how Katakana allows for the transcription of “foreign” words, and believed that might be a neat functional model. There’s one other piece that doesn’t come much into the current usage, because it’s a little bit inside baseball, but there are specific marks called “limitors” that act as punctuation alongside “commensors” that denote tone, including one that was designed for hierarchical systems like factories or life (“Autocratic”) that is specifically, consciously, purposefully never used anymore. One of the things that cranks me up about the prospect of a live action Automata is being able to actually hear Clickwise. Are you curious about that, also? We’re only fifty k or so away from the goal - consider backing the project at Kickstarter, and we can make that happen for you.

(CW)TB