I Made Up My Own Alphabet

I was looking at the pattern of some leaves painted on the back of someone's shirt in a class the other day and decided to mimic the strokes the leaves needed to be drawn with. The resulting stuff looked like it might fit in with various Asian calligraphy systems. It got me thinking on written language some. I figured it would be neat to come up with my own writing system, but knowing only english and the Latin alphabet fluently enough to try my hand making something new, I decided that rather than make an entirely new character, grammar, and word system (Ala-Esperanto) I'd just figure out a better way to do English writing.

What could possibly make English an even better language to write in than it already is I hear everyone say (aside from poorly sticking to rules, exceptions to pronunciation and conjugation that drive that make a phone book on their own, etc....), well obviously the Latin alphabet! There are many letters that can be too easily confused and with good punctuation you have little need for capital and lower-case letters rather than simply a letter. I decided there were some things that could be done to improve things:

* Cut down or eleminate letters and numbers that are indistinguishable when written with less than stellar or quick penmanship (no more 1,I, and l or U and V looking too similar when you're quickly jotting things down).
* Keep the per-character stroke count down. No need for a 20-stroke chinese character when a couple simple slashes will do.
* Avoid conflicting with english and numerical punctuation and notation (the + sign is easy to do, but will conflict with universal math language
* Avoid wasting simple to write characters on infrequently used letters (X is easy, but how often do you use it?)
* Try to keep parity with the Latin alphabet whenever possible (not a huge deal, but why reassign L to another letter without a good reason?)

Anywho, I messed around with making characters that applied to these rules and then assigned them places in either the 0-9 number set or the A-Z letter set, and this is what I came up with. The numbers make it easy to at a glance figure out where you are from 1-9 and the letters could be scrawled as poorly as possible and you'd still be able to tell what was meant. Anyway, it looks pretty geometric and neat so I may or may not try to memorize how to read and write in it. Maybe just a nice font for writing in it would be in order?

I made a mystery (in 2002)

Some time in 2002 I took apart a dead IBM model 5051 computer which had an equally dead 10MB hard drive in it. The computer went to the dump, but the hard drive was too unique to toss. There had been some bad head crashing, to the point that one of the read heads had been smashed off and was bouncing around inside the drive when I took it apart. I wasn't sure what to do with it; it was of not use in a computer since it was too broke too fix, but it did have a pretty good size space inside it once I'd removed the brassy platters.

I came about the idea that I should use it to store some information I could look back on after reading through old journals I wrote in 3rd grade, and eventually decided on writing a letter to myself, which I would then store in the hard drive as a time capsule. I wanted to try keeping it sealed for as long as possible to make sure I had time to forget what I'd written, originally wanting to keep it closed for 25 years, but I wanted to be able to crack it open before I was terribly old as well, so I weaned back the time to 10 years instead. Since screwing it back together with it's new "data" stored in an aluminum casing, I set it in a closet and tried to forget about it. I still pull it down every once in a while while I'm cleaning and resist the urge to crack it open. I originally taped a piece of paper with "2012" on it to the top, but eventually decided it would be better to replace that with "2012" etched into the metal of the case, so it couldn't be lost.

I still remember feeling somewhat guilty for not putting the exact date I closed it up on there, knowing that I would forget when that was, but I also remember doing that so I would be able to open it any time in 2012 I wished. I might carry it with me to whatever new year's party I do that year. All I can remember of what's written on it is a list of the friends I had at the time, but I know there's more than that. So that's about it, it's a mystery I've set my self up for. Maybe when the time comes I'll write some reflections on the first letter and make up another letter to myself for 2022. I'd like to make it a tradition if I can. It's always good to keep some mystery in your life, even if it's just an old hard drive in your closet.