Welcome to the Wongery!
The Wongery is a site for information about imaginary worlds. The
core features of the Wongery are the
Central Wongery, a wiki with content created by
the site's owners, and the Public Wongery,
where anyone can post their creations. All of the main content of
these wikis is released under an open license, so anyone can use it
for their own works, subject to the license's conditions.
Furthermore, aside from the description of the world, there are pages
devoted to additional applications, including RPG statistics, LEGO
models, and more.
If you're new here, feel free to browse the Central
Wongery or the Public Wongery, check out
the forum, or read the blog
to see a bit of the site's history.
(Yes, we know the site could really use some illustrations, among other things. The Wongery
is still very much a work in progress.)
Should I begin this blog post, as I so often do, briefly summarizing parts of past blog posts that are relevant? Probably not; anyone who is really interested would have read those posts and anyone who isn't really interested... isn't really interested. Am I going to do it anyway? Of course I am. Will I ever escape my unfortunate compulsion toward self-referentially criticizing my own blogging patterns, and perhaps even go so far as to actually consider changing them? Maybe. Maybe. But not today. Not today.
So last year in a post about the purpose of the Wongery I wrote that while of course the main purposes of the Wongery are to share my invented worlds and to encourage others to create and share their own, maybe a tertiary purpose of the Wongery is to encourage the use of open licenses, and that to that end I was myself moving toward using more open-source software. However, I admitted at the time that I was not, or at least not yet, exclusively...
This is a topic I've been anticipated writing a blog post on for some time. Long enough, in fact, that in March 2024 I created a text document in the OneDrive folder<ref>As I've said before, I'm trying to move away from using Microsoft products, but for now I'm still using OneDrive—partly because I haven't decided on a replacement yet, but mostly because my annual subscription doesn't run out till October, so until then I'm not giving Microsoft any money anyway, and so I don't have a strong motivation to look for a replacement until that month approaches. I did, however, when I decided to order a new laptop (for reasons not worth going into here, because even I have some limits as to how much rambling digression I allow myself), I chose one pre-installed with Linux rather than Windows—and, as my desktop has been warning me lately that its internal hard drive is in danger of failing, I plan to order a new hard drive for...
So, a lot of people really hate generative "AI", and I am okay with that because I am one of those people. In fact, I think more people should hate generative "AI". I've gone on at length about the reasons for this in a previous blog post, so I won't explain them again in detail here, but very briefly: even aside from questions about quality and intellectual property issues, generative "AI" is terrible for the environment, it's terrible for the economy, and the only reason it's being pushed so hard and shoved into everything is to give the tech industry an illusionary paradigm shift it can pretend to be working toward and to further line the pockets of billionaires.
And some people who really hate generative "AI" like to call out and decry "AI"-generated content when they see it, which I guess I would be okay with in principle, except that it seems a lot of those people are much less skilled...
