ktrey parker recently asked on Diaspora about pre-generating facts before you actually start writing, gender in particular. I’ve tried to avoid this by using singular they a lot. It works really well! But I confess, sometimes I was also happy to simply assume all druids were male and all witches were female.
The question made me think introducing a new keyword. [fact monster gender] would establish the “monster gender” which you could then use with [same monster gender] throughout. I like that better than just hiding the result using CSS because I love text browsers. 🙂
This isn’t strictly required because if we know where the *first* call to a table is, we can just drop the “same” keyword there and it will work as intended. If we’re writing a long text, we’re going to run into trouble if we’re rearranging it.
Here’s an example of how we would do it today:
Assume this text:
[ruler] had a centaur [raise their kid].
What we want is a result like this:
“Queen Alexa had a centaur raise her son.”
We just need to know where the gender is first determined and from then keep using “same”.
;gender 1,male 1,female ;ruler gender 1,[gender] ;kid gender 1,[gender] ;ruler 1,[[ruler gender] title] [[same ruler gender] name] ;male title 1,King ;female title 1,Queen ;male name 1,Alex ;female name 1,Alexa ;raise their kid 1,raise [[same ruler gender] possessive] [[kid gender] kid] ;male possessive 1,his ;female possessive 1,her ;male kid 1,son ;female kid 1,daughter
Result:
This example will always work if [ruler] is called first and determines [ruler gender] before it gets used later in [ruler gender] or [raise their kid]. If the order is ever changed, this will result in bugs that are hard to spot.
#Hex Describe