Now that we’re a month into the New Year, it’s time to go on record with some plans and details for 2015. Below, in no particular order, are the major non-writing things I and Many Words collaborators and non-posting friends will be working on this year.

The Nivkh-Quechua cognate hunt
A friend of mine has been looking for and finding a surprising number of cognates between Nivkh, a Siberian language, and Quechua, a South American language. Since his dictionary source material for Nivkh is primarily in Russian, I’m lending him my Russian experience to help out.

OpenTafl
Tafl, the Old Norse board game, has long been an object of fascination to me. It’s also a very poorly understood game. One of my projects this year is to finish a computer representation of several variants of the game, so that I and a friend of mine can investigate it more deeply than has been done to date. Also because it’s cool and there isn’t a good way to play with friends and I need to fix that.

Skypirates theme
Parvusimperator and I enjoy our shared Skypirates universe a lot, but we’d like to do some more world design in places we haven’t looked at much. We’ll have some details for you on China, Imperial Japan, and Nazi Germany, for sure, since Parvusimperator is doing most of the work there, along with Corregidor (the Tortuga of the Far East). I’ll probably be tackling the Australian Colonies, the American West Coast nation of Pacifica, and Tortuga (the Corregidor of the West).

The Casino Job
Parvusimperator is also planning on actually putting out a story in the Skypirates universe, featuring his own crew and his own zep. I won’t spoil anything besides the title.

An unspecified app project
Since my friend and I are slow workers, I’m not going to say anything about this until it’s nearly ready for prime time.

Projekt Archangel
I’m planning on modernizing a Mosin-Nagant rifle (don’t worry, collectors, there are tens of millions of them, and I have one to keep original) toward the end of this year. Pictures and build details when they happen.

Picking up the gauntlet
I guess I have to answer the challenges Parvusimperator threw down. Let no man say I am a poltroon.

Throwing down the gauntlet
The other half of the above.