Wiki discussion

[Fimbulvarg]

Job, about the timber cruiser: Are you sure it's not one of the currently existing ships of Viking Lines? A quick google search yielded several similar ships. I would link one of the images but wikipedia seems to be down at the moment.

The part about the ship being modified by the Norwegians, is that from Minna herself? It seems kind of strange for them to move it all the way over to the other side of Scandinavia.

[Pessi]

Job, about the timber cruiser: Are you sure it's not one of the currently existing ships of Viking Lines? A quick google search yielded several similar ships.

Actually it looks a lot like M/S Gabriella

The part about the ship being modified by the Norwegians, is that from Minna herself? It seems kind of strange for them to move it all the way over to the other side of Scandinavia.

Perhaps the shipwrights themselves came over and modified the ship on the Baltic see? It could well be that there is no sufficient know-how left in Finland or Sweden to manage such a big project.

[Fimbulvarg]

Actually it looks a lot like M/S Garbriella

Perhaps the shipwrights themselves came over and modified the ship on the Baltic see? It could well be that there is no sufficient know-how left in Finland or Sweden to manage such a big project.

Know-how is one thing but to to actually re-engineer the ship with carved out hull sides, additional superstructure and a massive prow they would need much heavier machinery than what they seem to have in Pori and Björköfjärden.

[JoB]

Job, about the timber cruiser: Are you sure it's not one of the currently existing ships of Viking Lines? A quick google search yielded several similar ships. I would link one of the images but wikipedia seems to be down at the moment.

We had a discussion about the existing Viking Line fleet back when the Timbercruiser appeared in the comic, from placement of the actual logo (midships, rather unusual for the current fleet) to specific ships being proposed (most prominently the Gabrielle). What killed all those speculations dead in the water was when the Paddlewheeler drew near and got swallowed whole hauled through a rather small-ish hole in the hull.

Most existing Viking Line ships are ro-ro ferries with a single car deck, and their largest are in the 100-150 meters (length) range IIRC. The Paddlewheeler has a length of 20 m as an absolute minimum, so there's no way that the Timbercruiser has less than 200 m.

The part about the ship being modified by the Norwegians, is that from Minna herself? It seems kind of strange for them to move it all the way over to the other side of Scandinavia.

Quote Minnas comment on page 92 (sorry, haven't found out how to make a link to a specific Disqus comment yet), re: the Timbercruiser's dragon figurehead: "... the Norwegians are the ones ruling the whole ship building/repairing industry, and they like their little viking ornaments. This particular ship ..."

EDIT: FWIW, this cruiser is flat out way too large to have been operating solely in the Baltic Sea pre-Rash. I'ld guess that it's a hypothetical Atlantic (passenger) cruise ship of the Viking Line that was near the Norwegian coast in the first place when the apocalypse hit, and got remodeled to carry the most unwieldy goods at hand (timber from Finland and Sweden to the West, and large pieces of scrap metal on the way back to the ironworks in Luleå), simply because that's the only thing that'll ever fill it in the low-population post-apoc world.

[JoB]

Should we categorize Vellamo et. al. as "creatures", or make a new category for them? If the latter, should that be "Gods", "Gods and Mythologicals", "Religion", ... ?

[Fimbulvarg]

Things like political organisation, religion and such could perhaps sort under a "society" category.

[Solovei]

Things like political organisation, religion and such could perhaps sort under a "society" category.

I had meant to make a page called "The Old Gods" and provide some info on there. We did use to have (not sure if it's still there) a "world" category which I intended to be for like, general world-building related information. They could go there.

[Fimbulvarg]

About Aurland. It's true that the placement of the large star icon on the map suggests that the settlement lies further inland than the actual, real world Aurland town, possibly all the way up to Årdalstangen. But - the star icon itself does not locate capitals accurately, just look at Mora which is miles away from its actual location and Bornholm which is in the middle of open sea. So I'm not sure we should speculate too much about its location.

[Firecrow91]

Hey, just wanted to throw this on here, but any opinions on accentless redirects? I've been doing a bit of editing on the wiki, and I've already gotten plenty annoyed at my boring old english keyboard when trying to search for Björköfjärden, for example. If we have Bjorkofjarden redirect to Björköfjärden, it would show up in search autocomplete and make it a lot easier for English-speaking folk to get around the wiki.

[JoB]

About Aurland. It's true that the placement of the large star icon on the map suggests that the settlement lies further inland than the actual, real world Aurland town, possibly all the way up to Årdalstangen. But - the star icon itself does not locate capitals accurately, just look at Mora which is miles away from its actual location and Bornholm which is in the middle of open sea. So I'm not sure we should speculate too much about its location.

Hmmmmm, point, but. Someone commented that the dotted circle for Höfn, Iceland, suggested that its inhabitants have unexpectedly grown gills and Minna seemed embarrassed, so it's not like she intended the markup to wind up way off the actual locations ...

[JoB]

Hey, just wanted to throw this on here, but any opinions on accentless redirects? I've been doing a bit of editing on the wiki, and I've already gotten plenty annoyed at my boring old english keyboard when trying to search for Björköfjärden, for example. If we have Bjorkofjarden redirect to Björköfjärden, it would show up in search autocomplete and make it a lot easier for English-speaking folk to get around the wiki.

I'm very much in favor, and created the "Bjorkofjarden" redirect to see how to enter redirects in the first place. You create a "new page" with the desired name, and instead of entering text, you open the three-horizontal-bars menu, select the first item (called "Seiteneinstellungen" for me - "page properties"?), tick the "redirection" checkbox, and enter the name of the target page.

One word of caution, though: When you create links on a page and type ASCII-only up to and beyond the first differing character, autocompletion will show and save a link to the accentless version, which will then display a page with the "Redirected from ..." blemish near the top. That'd be sloppy work IMHO.

I'll withhold creating more redirects 'til this discussion has reached a consensus, though.

By the way, when you select the "categories" tab in the same menu, you get an additional text field controlling how the page shall be put in sorted lists. As far as I can tell, the sort order is already correct for the Nordic alphabets (special characters following after "Z") ... ?

[Solovei]

As someone with an english keyboard, I absolutely welcome the idea of the accentless re-directs. I'll pop over and have a look at how they work in a second! Let me know if you need help with it.

EDIT: also, do you guys know if it's possible to link to a section of an internal page? Like, if I want a link to go to one of the prologue characters, if I put in the actual URL (such as blahblahblah/Prologue_Characters#Arni), it treats it as an external link... any way around that?

[Lenny]

Ah, just chipping in here to give a hint about keyboards: If you don't have one with accents (actually, I had no idea there were keyboards with accented letters), set your keyboard layout to U.S. International. It's got a whole series of shortcuts that give the accents you need (listed here). I've been using it for years.

That's if you have a Windows computer, of course. I've no idea about Macs or Linux.

[JoB]

I've no idea about Macs or Linux.

You don't want to know what one can do with the xmodmap command on unixoid machines running an X11-based GUI.

Today's nigh-infallible Swiss pocket knife to posting weird characters in fora is to bookmark pertinent pages and use the mouse to copy-paste them from one browser window/tab into another. There are only two de facto standard character sets in the history of the WWW, the original ISO-Latin-1 and the current Unicode, as opposed to the myriad charsets that some machine's OS might have set as default.

[Fimbulvarg]

You don't want to know what one can do with the xmodmap command on unixoid machines running an X11-based GUI.

Today's nigh-infallible Swiss pocket knife to posting weird characters in fora is to bookmark pertinent pages and use the mouse to copy-paste them from one browser window/tab into another. There are only two de facto standard character sets in the history of the WWW, the original ISO-Latin-1 and the current Unicode, as opposed to the myriad charsets that some machine's OS might have set as default.

Windows comes with a digital display keyboard, maybe there is a way to install a Scandinavian version of it if it lacks the necessary icons. If we could install a addon to the forum adding buttons for certain characters that would be even better though.