I love freebase.com. It is a very aptly named site. Much like Wikipedia, where you can find yourself getting sucked from link to link, you could spend hours just clicking around. It becomes really dangerous when you consider how low the barrier to entry is to add new information. If you modify your account to keep you permanently in edit mode, then you see all these little blank spaces of where information is missing, and you just can’t help but fill it in. You don’t know what language that episode of Will and Grace that you are watching was in, well guess what? I do. Let me just click edit here, type out “English Language” pick the item off the list, enter and I’m done. Oh wait. This doesn’t list that this character was in this episode. Let me just fix that real quick, and… You can see how you can become lost.
My real focus, has of course, been in the fictional realm. I love the idea of being able to not only be able to look up any book, tv show, movie or comic book and not only see the actors and authors and artists associated with those works, but the character and places described by these works and the connections between them.
In my fleshing out of some of the fictional universes that are close to my heart, I decided that I wanted to be able to track who was killing who. I had to create two new types for the killers and the killed. Of course only fictional characters can kill other fictional characters, (act of the author notwithstanding) so the killers and the killed are co-typed as fictional characters, but the killed characters are now dead. We need a type to track that information. So the deceased character is created, i need a way to track when they died. I can’t use real time. We know that Leto Atreides died in 10,191 AG., but when in AD years was the guild formed? In junior high, I calculated the events of Dune to be somewhere around 50,000 AD using a chronology in the non-canonical Dune Encyclopedia but I don’t really trust that for serious data entry.
So the Fictional Date/Time type was created. It sliced, it dices, it holds a slot for dates occurring in the Gregorian Calendar and a matched pair of slots for both the numerical date and the fictional calendar system that date is based on. Whether you want to know when lightning struck the clock tower or when Hayden Christensen managed to get himself inserted into Luke’s post-dramatic stress-induced acid trip you’re covered.
But wait, there’s more
If you act now, I’ll throw in a link to works of fiction portrayed in at no extra cost. No longer will you have to lose sleep trying to figure out exactly when the events of Care Bears II took place. This multi-purpose co-type works well in any situation
- Books
- TV Shows
- Plays
- Movies
- Comic Books
- Comic Strips
- Autobiographies of political figures
Well I am happy to announce that I was able to convince the powers that be at Freebase of the usefulness of the bottom layer in my quest to have a definitive list of every actor to kill someone in an episode of Monk. Fictional Date/Time, Fictional Calendar System, and Calendar System Directionality (forward and reverse) have been removed from my fictionaluniverse base and into the fictional_universe commons.
The deceased fictional character has many problems still owing both to a limitation of the levels of nesting that can occur with CVTs and the fact that because of DC comics, these damn superheroes just won’t stay dead. I’ll post more on that in another post.
