Today, after a month’s delay for travel and reworking my website, I have resumed work on Siboot. I gritted my teeth, hoisted up my belt, fired up SWAT, and created my first verb – express feeling – and immediately hit a brick wall with inversion. How does a character express negative affinity for another? Should the sentence be “Subject express feeling affinity six invert”? How would the player know in advance that the way to express negative affinity is to start with affinity, quantify it, then invert it? Should there be six objects for the verb: affinity, inverted affinity, unfear, inverted unfear, trust, inverted trust?
I really wish that I had a more compact way to express inversion. Here are two ways to say “Locksher dislikes Gardbore three" with the inversion glyph:
Neither one of these looks right to me.
Hmm, I have some freedom of action with the borders, especially in the rectangular corners. Perhaps something like this:
The first of the three, using something like a traditional sub glyph, doesn’t look good. The second seems better and the third is OK. I like the black space around the second; it clearly indicates that something is wrong or different or backwards.
OK, I’ll go with this. It means that some words will double in form. Instead of “express like” with a possible inverting adverb, there will be two verbs, “express like” and “express dislike”.
Yep, that’s better.