Mzimwi

The strange preponderance of human feet amongst the jetsam of the Salish Sea Since August 20, 2007, several detached human feet have been discovered on the coasts of the Salish Seain British Columbia, Canada. and Washington, United States. The feet belonged to five men, one woman and three other people of unknown sex. Of the ten or 11 feet found, only two have been left feet. Both of those were matched with right feet. As of February 2012, only five feet of four people have been identified; it is not known to whom the rest of the feet belong. In addition, several hoax feet have been planted in the area. Decomposition may separate the foot from the body because the ankle is relatively weak, and the buoyancy caused by air either inside or trapped within a shoe would allow it to float away.[5] According to Simon Fraser University entomologist Gail Anderson, extremities such as the hands, feet, and head often detach as a body decomposes in the water, although they rarely float.[40] However, finding feet and not the rest of the bodies has been deemed unusual. Finding two feet has been given a "million to one odds" and has thus been described as "an anomaly".[5] The finding of the third foot made it the first time three such discoveries had been made so close to each other.[40] The fourth discovery caused speculation about human interference and, statistically, was called "curious".[41]

hmm - what is the difference between learning to read a language and to speak it? you can learn to read chinese and never know how to speak it. also, this is a small set of symbols, maybe a hundred and a few that can be improvised. so it shouldn't be expensive - 1 point for basic, 2 for fluent, i guess. by the way, for language nerds, you must learn a bit of haitian creole. "li pale franse" which one would think means 'he speaks french" means "he's a liar". the word 'neg' from the french word for 'black' means 'person' - 'mwen neg' = 'i'm a person' whereas 'blan' means 'foreign' without regard to skin color. in face, there's huge range of words for various hair and skin combinations. it's like ghetto french - 'se gwo, sa!'

I'm working on a different kind of rune magic, one much less power than the system in Grimoire. It's what i'm used to calling syntactic magic - the runes are words, you cast a spell by making phrase out of them. This system is used exclusively for making fairly mundane magic items. Here's the flavor text: and an example of the glyphs. more later, still noodling this.

well, i have some fluff for you - about shadow elementals/mirage djinn. setting - a group congenitally insane Savage Elves are discussing technological advances in their evilness....

you do understand that you have an obligation to the public.....gifts of mythopoeitic genus carry a burden, ndugu wangu.

Is your work on spirits online? Love to see....

What brought this on? I just started working on this project again! Thanks.

I briefly worked on a world that was centered around the endless war between Faerie and Goblins. The Fey had magic, the Goblins psionics. The third clade was hybrids (humans, chimps, ogres, cherubs) - they had magnetism, because iron poisoned fey and blocked magic, while magnetic fields scrambled psi.

I experimented with making it more mechanistic (stats are GURPS, I abandoned this before switching to HERO)

I have lots of material on how spirts are viewed in real world Africa - mostly scientific articles from JSTOR. If you nix the Bantu words, most of it is generally applicable. Here are a few samples, each from a different article:

I use something similar to this idea in my Wajabu world. Beadwork is one of the fundamental ways of enchanting an item, thus beadwork leather shirts take the place of metal armor, which was never invented and would probably cause a heatstroke in an equatorial climate.

Update: First, I'm changing the name of the setting as a whole. 'Ubantu' is still used to mean 'civilized lands' but the setting as a whole is now 'Wajabu' from 'U'=land of and '-aajabu'=miracles and wonder. 'Alice in Wonderland' is 'Elisi katika Ncha ya Ajabu'. For a while it looked like Indie Press Revolution was going to help me find a co-author and walk this through Kickstarter, but that has fallen through. Back to looking for a co-author who knows HERO well, we can Kickstart it ourselves after that. Steve Long liked it - these are his comments and those of Jason Walters (in italics). I don't think I'm revealing anything private here, I certainly don't mean to.

This is VERY sensitive to relate, but I barely escaped being raped. I'd had a fifth of vodka and some benzo and went outside to pee, Guy followed me and threw me down and very nearly got there before my friends rescued me. Years later I met him and he apologized. We talked and eventually I went home with him - hell, he was cute. I've been cavity searched, too. It's just medical - hell, when I was a kid, a doctor held me down and did a spinal tap. I don't get the personality damage part of that. The worst thing you could do to me is a lobotomy - knowing you're going to cut my brain and take part of me away. Or waiting to be executed. Lots of nightmares about that.

oxen don't run right - there aren't different gaits like with a horse, a cow just panics and bolts. pre colonial africans rode oxen a fair amount. also, i think cows spent a lot more time eating low cal foods. then again, people ride elephants. there are two pages on the GURPS forum, one mine, about domestic dinosaurs and riding birds.

Has anyone ever seriously studied if ratites would be useful as mounts, were they a bit bigger? There's more to it than size - a place to sit, a means of guiding the animal, a gait that doesn't crush your pelvis, etc. What makes a mount?