You Could Feel The Sky

Twentieth Century Fox (suck it, Murdoch)

The past few weeks I've been starting work whilst it's still dark and stood at my window waiting for my lift. The first day I was staring out toward the hills in the distance and a light appeared on the limb and grew brighter and brighter moving right until quickly fading. Whilst I wandered what I had seen, the same phenomenon repeated itself and then I realised I was watching the headlights of cars on the road along the hillside. Similarly, the first time I saw an Iridium satellite in the sky I wanted to believe it was something supernatural, but by actually being educated in my observation I knew it was only a communications dish catching the sun over the horizon. As someone who would like to see evidence of extraterrestrial life or of the paranormal, is it not odd that I've never seen an aerial phenomenon that I was unable to identify? I've got Mulder's I Want To Believe poster on my wall for more than just X-Files fandom. Most UFO reports really are of Venus refracted through swamp gas, because most people can't identify the brightest planet in the sky.

Just the Two of Us

Crushed By The Wheels of Industry (Music Video), Heaven 17, 1982

Last December I hardly wrote anything because the crushing Christmas post meant that I was going to bed early to get up for work early to work till late. It's October and that's already the state of affairs. Only resourceful use of scheduled posts has kept me from being completely silent this month. How is it that one of the better months of the year is resulting in massive overtime payouts, uncompleted walks and undelivered packets? It's not Christmas, it's not snowing... it's "modernisation"!

Some Might Say

Flag of the Getae

Some might say that I have no idea what I want from a conlang. Although this one is in no way genetically related or even similar to previous samples, I still think of them as incarnations of my conlang. That said, I have figured what I want to try out with this one. Last year I said I was trying to out-weird Albanian, so I've gone ahead and made a sister language to Albanian - which, as far as I know, no-one has tried. Most likely because Albanian is poorly and lately attested compared to well documented languages like Latin which has spawned countless Romlangs as a result. On the basis that Albanian is a descendant of Dacian (and that Romanian has a Dacian substrate), I've scraped together what little (free*) information is out there and applied them to yield plausible cognates with Albanian.

*A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language is currently £154 on Amazon and only partially viewable for free on Google Books.