This week I've uncovered a bumper crop of cool stuff to inspire and enthral you, dear reader. No one is more surprised by this than me - I'm currently working two jobs, and have been feeling creatively bankrupt and generally hit by a truck in terms of energy levels. One of them is a contract that wraps this coming week, so relief is in sight.

Enough about my Mad Max style corporate adventuring though, and on to the first cool thing. Dr Diane Davies, an archeologist specialising in the Mayans, has put together a fantastic resource on the Mayan civilisation. What really caught my eye was her write up on the Mayan hieroglyphic writing system. It makes our current living languages look like amateur hour for the sheer complexity of it

I tend to watch YouTube videos over dinner, and this week I've been on a medieval tear. Jason Kingsley's Modern History TV is a goldmine for this kind of thing. During one of his videos, he mentioned a mercenary company - the White Company. Naturally this led to a wikipedia expedition. The White Company was a free company in the 14th century. It sounds fancy, until you learn that "free company" was basically a band of professionals specialising in ultra-violence for hire. And when no one was hiring for ultra-violence? They'd just start plundering the countryside. In essence, they were the on-land equivalent of the privateers that the great empires would use to terrorise the oceans. Pirates with a piece of paper that may or may not be valid depending on when you caught them.

Following on from roving bands of 14th century mercenaries, we have a book on "masterless men" by A.L. Beier. Beier describes this class of people best in his introduction:

They were 'masterless' in a period when the able-bodied poor were supposed to have masters. They also broke with official conventions of family, economic, religious and political life, some even venturing down the dangerous paths of organised crime and rebellion.

If you've ever been questioned by well meaning friends and family about not following the "normal" path of life, have no fear. There's a long lineage of folk doing their own thing in the face of a world that desperately wished to shove them in a box and nail the lid shut.

Speaking of fitting into the standard boxes of life paths, here's one form of rebellion that I can get behind - coffee badging. Popular in the tech hell of Silicon Valley, it's where you show up on site for just enough time to badge in, grab a coffee, spread some gossip, and then return home to work for the rest of the day. Having visited said Tech Hell myself, I can see how and why you'd want to do this, and I whole heartedly support work from home (as a fully remote employee).
If you can't trust your employees to work from home, what makes you think they're working in the office? The amount of grab-ass and horsing around that I've seen in-office makes me think I actually overwork when remote, and that I should take it easier 😂

Rounding out today's link-fest is a lovely font I ran across - Hubano. It was inspired by the font on a Cuban cigar wrapper (according to the author). I'm mulling over doing something with the font. There's just something about the font's old world charm that's caught my attention. I do have an upcoming product I want to launch when I get a spare moment to do more than work, eat, and sleep. Hubano is feeling inspirationally suitable as a brand anchor font...

Story Inspiration of the week

Our story inspiration for this week comes from a headline I saw on my lunch break, played along a new broadcast's chryon/ticker tape:

Warning for mariners as ghost rig lights goes out

More details on this can be found in the ABC news article on the oil rig. Unlike what the ticker tape would have you believe, it isn't the Flying Dutchman making an antipodean visit. An oil rig eleven kilometres off the coast has been abandoned by a company gone bankrupt, and is rusting into decrepitude. As the Maritime Union of Australia's spokesperson said, "It's very dark out there". An encounter with a ghostly oil rig might be the perfect location for your next story.
The obvious leap is for a horror/horror adjacent story - it worked fine for Still Wakes The Deep after all. An oil rig surrounded by an empty ocean, and a storm or fog are a great start for a spooky atmosphere. Add in an as yet undiscovered deep sea creature that's doing darkly evil things to the rig, and you have the beginnings of a ripper of a yarn.

Let's push ourselves a little more though - how do we take a distinctly unsettling location like an oil rig surrounded by nothing by ocean, and create a non-horror adventure story with it?

A world in which humans mostly live on the sea, either because of something wrong with the land (plague, nuclear fallout, etc), or because the land is now underwater due to extreme climate change. In this kind of world, civilisation is a broad swathe of city states, each one a former oil rig, lighthouse, or ship of some kind.
Alliances spring up for trade, defence, construction and repair of ships, and so on. Technology is ecologically friendly, and a lot of effort is spent in agri-tech to produce the food and feedstocks necessary to keep everyone alive and afloat. New ships and construction are made with engineered wood, and metal is at a premium (as it requires underwater mining/salvage)
In this rich solarpunk canvas we find our protagonist, an enterprising mechanic on the largest of a cluster of former oil rigs. They dream of leaving, exploring the world on a sailing vessel. Their dream may be closer than they realise.
A trader returning from a circuit among the rigs brings bad news. Wildsea, a rig on the edge of the cluster, and the most remote of all the rigs has gone dark, and hasn't been heard from for some time. Our protagonist's friend is on Wildsea, on a 6 month rotation as part of the medical corps.
The witch of November is soon to come calling with the start of storm season only weeks away. Unless someone makes it out there, Wildsea will be on their own for months, as the weather makes a trip dangerous at the best of times. Our protagonist must use all their ingenuity, resourcefulness and bravery if they are to find out what has become of their friend...

That's all for now folks. I hope this letter finds you well,
Justin

This work is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0