A couple days ago I finally finished reading through Meepster’s journal. Lots of food for thought in there. With the most recent bits being someone teaching students about the periodic table of elements, including using the principle Mr. Li for Lithium, and having looked through Lynne Kelly’s bestiary it became very clear how those two things go together so well.
She might call my own bestiary a visual alphabet; it’s a set of mythological creatures both “real” and from video games that are specifically not human in any way.
Lynne has lists where the first two letters are important, and makes a whole lot of sense, especially if you want to use them to help pronounce foreign words.
Anyway, that night I looked at the periodic table of elements and decided I wasn’t going to encode them all. It’s definitely a good exercise, and would be a solid way to practice and expand your bestiary(ies), your PAO, and other systems but it just has no relevance to my life.
Still, I picked one thing to practice with: Argon.
The first thing I did was decide on what to use for ‘Ar’, and ended up with arm chair. Best choice? Probably not, but it jumps out. The atomic number is 18. I don’t have a 00-99 PAO, so I just went with Android 18. Combining those, I have an arm chair that is tailored to look like 18’s outfit.
For Argon I needed an avatar. With one, you can easily make stories to tack on more details later. My thoughts went something like “Arson? ‘ARG!’? Argonauts? Arg…onian? OH YEAH THOSE EXIST!”
Then I looked at a completely unpracticed 0-9 PAO that’s sitting in my notes and basically just read what the atomic number would be, putting near zero effort into visualizing them, or trying to remember what each part meant.
The next day, a generic Argonian was still there, as expected. The arm chair and it’s dual meaning is there, no problem. But the atomic number? I was pleasantly surprised to discover I could remember “Dryad leaping on a sea urchin (39.), Kain Highwind driving a whip (348).” There was a mistake. I thought the whip was 7, then felt confused ‘Or is it 8?’ but leaned on 7.
So I picked a room to put the information in. Now the door has a glass canister trimmed on top and bottom with gold, encrusted with gemstones. Inside is a glowing purple mist (my imagination insists on the glow, I can only ‘turn it off’ with effort): Noble gas.
In the room and to the left, an arm chair dressed like Android 18 sits on the treadmill. Sitting in the chair is a purple argonian wearing a maid’s outfit. Specific characters work better than generic, so I upgraded her to the only argonian I know about. My time in Skyrim was spent punching horses and running away from guards, so there’s no story character for me to pick.
On the window we have the dryad leaping on an urchin, and Kain Highwind driving a whip. The latter image isn’t very good, I don’t know if I really have it encoded or just remember it.
This might not be the best way to structure things, I have three separate pieces of information all lumped into one image. In this case it seems fine, but my gut tells me it would be better to just pick a consistent order and separate them.
In my head and not pinned to any locus, I see three argonians zipping around in airplanes: argon is the third most plentiful element in the air.
Should probably have involved them in my peg list instead somehow. Bruce Lee is my #3, and having him face off against the argonian maid on the wing of a plane seems like it would be better than trying to make sure there are always exactly 3 of something in the air.
I also see the maid getting stung by an angry yellow jacket on the shoulder, without react to it: Argon is inert, and doesn’t react to most chemicals.
The above are just random things loosely encoded while glancing through wikipedia.