I sometimes feel embarrassed by this hobby. I’m a grown man playing make believe, and I don’t have the excuse of saying it’s for a book or game. But occasionally I gain useful skills through the course of my conworlding.
Over the weekend I ported all my Obsidian notes for the Lonely Galaxy to DokuWiki. Part of that process involved extracting the hashtags from each markdown file and transforming them into a format that the DokuWiki tag plugin could parse. This involved some Python regex nonsense.
Now I’m at work, and lo and behold, I’m encountering a nearly identical problem, porting an Obsidian vault to another format, with tag extraction being one of the steps. So I revisited the script I wrote for the LG wiki to see how I did it. It’s one function with a single return statement.
def get_tags(some_string):
return re.findall(r"#\w+",some_string)
So as shy as I am about this project, it is proving useful.
The ability to design power structures helps in understanding power structures that I’m working in.
There are a lot of people who assume everyone is aligned on projects, even if those projects have multiple independent organizations. If you can understand how people are motivated outside of your internal motivations, it can make it easier for you to deal with other organizations.
I’ve had a few “ah-hah” moments like that as well. A lot of my project is about ergonomics, how an arboreal quadruped with a prehensile tail would design a door, or a means of moving up and down floors in a building, or computer input and output devices, etc. Then I’m reminded that my own surroundings were designed by and for tailless terrestrial bipeds. I think about how a yinrih would fare on Earth. Nothing about his health or mental state has changed, only his location. But now he’s suddenly disabled since nothing he encounters day to day is designed with him in mind. The reverse is also true, a human at Focus would have a hard time even navigating indoor areas, which have lower ceilings, and probably couldn’t move between floors because yinrih use ladders rather than stairs.
It was a revelatory moment for me, that disability is just as much a function of your surroundings. Make the surroundings more accessible and the person becomes less disabled. It’s not like I didn’t know this stuff already. I am blind after all, but it recontextualized it in a very helpful way.
