And yet, we are so often constrained by it and use it as a measure of accomplishment. Take this post, for instance. I had intended to write it and share it on the first day of the new year. But, sadly, demands on my time carrying over from the previous year meant that I didn’t quite get to it until now.
It’s been several years and at least one pandemic since I’ve blogged regularly. There’s no guarantee I will again, but I find myself with the urge to write. Besides this blog, I find myself wanting to scratch that old itch; writing fiction. Specifically, science fiction. I’ve gotten a couple of ideas for a space opera setting, similar to the universe developed by Mark Miller in the Traveller role-playing game, but with a little more light-hearted action. However, after a couple of false starts at world-building for a setting that might hold these stories, I decided that the best thing to do would be to start by making that setting the object of the creative writing. Again, not my first attempt at that, but in the closing days of 2022, things aligned so that I had several tools for WordPress that would make this experimental project significantly easier. Namely, I wrote two plugins specifically meant to help science fiction writers.
The first plugin is the Space Opera Template plugin. Essentially, all it does is add templates to an active WordPress installation containing code for random generators. I’ve had the basic PHP code for the actual random generators for a number of years, but adding that to a WordPress site has always been a bit of a challenge because when a site’s theme changes, so do the templates. That means that any time someone restyled their WordPress, they’d have to copy my templates from one spot to another, or the pages with those random generators would break. The new plugin makes those templates available regardless of the theme. I probably need to do some things to refine the styling of those pages so they pick up the theme style, but that update will be for a time when I get writer’s block.
The second plugin is the Future Date plugin, which, as you might have guessed, allows one to override the built-in WordPress time and date functions to use another “futuristic” date. I used an old plugin, wp-stardate, as the basis for mine. (By that, I mean I stole a LOT of code from that excellent plugin!) So, yes, one of the future date options is to use the “classic” stardate from Star Trek. Then, I added functions for the Terran Computational Calendar, which seemed fairly science-fictional in its thinking, as well as the ordinal date and the Empire of Man dating format used in Warhammer 40K. But, not satisfied with that, I added the function to force dates into the future using a modifier of the user’s choice and a trailing text identifier, so one could make the format either “Stardate xxxxxx.xx” or “xxxxxx.xx Stardate”, or whatever the user desires for those identifiers. Or even none at all! So, now, you can blog in the future of your choice!
But this all really started last year when I decided to evaluate my portfolio of domain names. I’ve had quite a few over the years, and some, like HavePalmWillTravel, have outlived their usefulness. I got HavePalmWillTravel when I used a PalmPilot, complete with a folding keyboard and camera and Cisco console cable, as part of my “road warrior” existence. Now, 90% of those functions are handled by my smartphone, and I probably could find a USB-C to Cisco cable if I really wanted to do that. Thankfully, it’s not something I usually need for my job these days. So, as sorry as I was to see some of those old domains go, a lot of them had become recurring costs for projects that were either over or never got off the ground. While I was doing that, though, on a whim, I checked for some others and found that EncyclopediaGalacticaFoundation.com was available, so I bought it. And, yes, those plugins and some other styling have been happening on that site as part of the aforementioned creative writing and world-building project.
Now, I just have to write it.
So, that’s what I have planned for the new year, along with continuing to work long hours at my day job to pay for all the other things I do.