Nuntar
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Something a little different for this month. Your task, should you accept it, is to design a flag for any one of the countries of the Eighth. Information on the countries of the Eighth can be found here.

Rules:

1. Design a flag for any one of the countries of the Eighth, and submit it together with a short explanation of the design, i.e. why you selected the colours and layout you did. Don't worry if English isn't your first language; you will be judged on the choices you made and the quality of the resulting design, not on the quality of your prose.

2. Images must be no larger than 480 x 300 pixels. One of the less space-consuming formats is recommended, not BMP.

3. Each person may submit up to three entries. If submitting more than one entry, they can be for different countries or the same country.

Suggestions:

This is an excellent page on flag design, and includes the "five basic principles". I highly recommend both that you study the site before designing your entry, and that you consider the five principles when judging the entries. This page offers two slightly different lists of criteria, but the basic principles are the same.

Timing:

You have negative 812 weeks, 5 days to submit your entries.

Prizes:

Prizes are as usual:
100 rank points (not to be confused with mod points) and a pick from the prize pile for winning
50 rank points for coming second
25 for coming third.

You may also see your flag become the official flag for an Eighthian country, but I'm not in a position to guarantee it!

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50th Skywatcher

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[Last edited by Nuntar at 05-04-2009 05:43 PM]

skell
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Will the overall graphical quality be judged? ie. so that if I add neat lights to my flag, will it get a better result or should I stick to simple, polished stuff, because the meaning is most important?

EDIT: And what are the Eighth countriesWhat countries does the Eighth have and what are their characteristics?

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[Last edited by skell at 05-04-2009 03:45 PM]

skell
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VIPCOOL wrote:
There is a lot of information on the site here.

Thanks very much! I have to admit I completely forgot about this part of the site, otherwise I would have probably found it myself... Oh well.

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Nuntar
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skell wrote:
Will the overall graphical quality be judged? ie. so that if I add neat lights to my flag, will it get a better result or should I stick to simple, polished stuff, because the meaning is most important?

I can't control how people choose to vote, but I recommend that voters stick to judging the quality of the design and not the particular image used to depict it.

Thanks for the link, VIPCOOL -- I should have searched that out myself. I'll add it to the top post.

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coppro
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Note that we won't be able to submit Dugandy, as King Dugan's face is owned by Caravel.

Samuel
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I'll make a flag. Sounds like fun.

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Nuntar
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coppro wrote:
Note that we won't be able to submit Dugandy, as King Dugan's face is owned by Caravel.

Why would that be a problem? Or are you joking? (Sorry -- over the internet it can be hard to tell.)

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coppro
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Nuntar wrote:

coppro wrote:
Note that we won't be able to submit Dugandy, as King Dugan's face is owned by Caravel.

Why would that be a problem? Or are you joking? (Sorry -- over the internet it can be hard to tell.)

It's a joke - I have reason to believe that Dugandy's flag likely includes King Dugan's face (namely because he's a pompous idiot).

hyperme
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Uh, can we has submission thread?
Or do we flag here?


Anyhow, I've got a flag done and two plans:

Akandia (Joke, Done)
??? (Semi Joke, idea, rule bending )
Oyst (More serious, idea)

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Tahnan
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In spite of what that linked page claims, Ephelna seems to be a continent, not a country. Dugandy has its own king, so it must be its own country, right? And Parnip and Fulce...might be? And if Clarbag is "kingless", do they have no government; or is each town its own political entity; or are they an anarcho-syndicalist commune...?

This isn't at all a complaint about the contest (which is a really cool idea); I'm just having a hard time getting a sense of the areas of the Eighth. (Which I only just learned is apparently conical, not flat, as if someone is eating a slice of pizza by bending it in half so its edges meet. Wait, hold on--that makes sense given that the left edge of the map lines up with the right edge, but not given that, er, I'm really confused now.)

agaricus5
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Tahnan wrote:
In spite of what that linked page claims, Ephelna seems to be a continent, not a country. Dugandy has its own king, so it must be its own country, right? And Parnip and Fulce...might be? And if Clarbag is "kingless", do they have no government; or is each town its own political entity; or are they an anarcho-syndicalist commune...?

I believe that this confusion stems from the original issue that Erik had with the defining of the Eighth; all the large land-masses depicted are in fact continents. For comparison with Earth, the Eighth has a radius of 5000 miles.

I'm not up to scratch with the canon, but I suspect that most "countries", as defined by groups of people in an area presided over by some form of leadership, have not in fact been named.

This isn't at all a complaint about the contest (which is a really cool idea); I'm just having a hard time getting a sense of the areas of the Eighth. (Which I only just learned is apparently conical, not flat, as if someone is eating a slice of pizza by bending it in half so its edges meet. Wait, hold on--that makes sense given that the left edge of the map lines up with the right edge, but not given that, er, I'm really confused now.)

The Eighth is so called because its topology has been defined as being flat. A single slice (as depicted on the map) only forms one-eighth of a circular disc. This disc is made up of eight of these slices tiled around to make a so-called "pie" shape.

Apparently, the Eighth's eight slices are identical, in that if you were to take any 45-degree slice, and take an adjoining 45-degree slice, they should overlap identically (i.e. all characters, objects, materials and so on, will be in the exact same place with the exact same state). Thus, there are eight Beethros, eight King Dugans, eight of every dungeon, eight of everything! But, since each is identical (the Eighth universe is chaotic, not random), it does not matter which of the eight versions we follow in the story (they are identical). The only way for people to observe each of their copies is to approach Sun Island very closely (or perhaps use a very powerful telescope).

At the two "poles", located at the centre and outer edge of the Eighth, there is a strange space warping that maps each point along the outer edge to the central point. From what I remember, the central point where this takes place is not infinitely small, meaning that a ring of fire (or light) surrounds the outer edge, where the contents of the "sun" are radiated outwards. Presumably the water of the sea also flows back through the edge to the central point, where it is converted to steam, forming the steam cloud that emanates from Sun Island.

Edit: The canon may be further advanced than this (I missed a lot in two years), so please correct me if I am in fact mistaken.

____________________________
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[Last edited by agaricus5 at 05-07-2009 10:55 PM]

Nuntar
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(CAVEAT: This reply comes from a non-DROD-player whose information in turn comes from occasionally browsing old forum posts, and also may not be accurate....)

It's a mistake to think that there are seven other slices; if you went near Sun Island you would see seven of you (as well as the eighth you doing the seeing), but this should no more be taken literally than the second you that you see in a mirror. The Eighth is like a torus (doughnut-shape, if you prefer) in that its east and west edges are continuous (if you fly due East you will return to your start, as on a globe) and its north and south are continuous (unlike a globe). However, as well as this, one edge is compressed to a point, which nevertheless manages to be continuous with the opposite vertical plane. (This is why the shape of the Eighth is impossible to recreate in our universe.)

Anyhow, I'm going to be liberal and say that you may make a flag for any geopolitical region, even if it is not a "country" in the most literal sense of the word.

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NiroZ
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Almost forgot. I want to thank Techant with coming up with this contest idea.

agaricus5
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Nuntar wrote:
(CAVEAT: This reply comes from a non-DROD-player whose information in turn comes from occasionally browsing old forum posts, and also may not be accurate....)

Heh.

The major difference is that I was there, and probably the one making a significant number of said posts about the Eighth.

Edit: It is painful and difficult, but this you may wish to read. I almost can't believe I was responsible for it, but nevertheless accept full responsibility.

It's a mistake to think that there are seven other slices

Really?

if you went near Sun Island you would see seven of you (as well as the eighth you doing the seeing)

Technically, no, since you would probably need to be on top of the mountain to see the versions of you on the opposite side, but that's just me being pedantic.

but this should no more be taken literally than the second you that you see in a mirror.

Actually, it does. The second person you see in the mirror is a direct reflection of yourself. However, each copy of the person you would see is a rotated version, not reflected. For example, if you were to get all eight versions to face the sun, then ask them to turn left, all would turn in the same direction, causing everyone to end up looking at the next person's back.

In a mirror-like world, your next version would turn to face you, which would then split the Eighth into alternating mirror-slices, and also require that these slices have specific boundaries (otherwise where do your reflections meet?).

The Eighth is like a torus (doughnut-shape, if you prefer) in that its east and west edges are continuous (if you fly due East you will return to your start, as on a globe) and its north and south are continuous (unlike a globe).

This is insofar as you move from the start of one slice onto another (the slices are identical, so this is practically like moving back to your start point. I'm not sure about the torus idea; I thought the Eighth is more like an (infolded) cylinder.

Edit 2: The winning entry for the Master Map of the Eighth contest should give you some idea about what it might look like if you could elevate yourself off the surface far enough.

However, as well as this, one edge is compressed to a point, which nevertheless manages to be continuous with the opposite vertical plane. (This is why the shape of the Eighth is impossible to recreate in our universe.)

Edge? Plane?

As I remember it, there is a vertical line that runs orthogonally through the Eighth at the centre of Sun Island. This is mapped onto the cylindrical outer boundary.

____________________________
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[Last edited by agaricus5 at 05-08-2009 01:01 AM]

Nuntar
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agaricus5 wrote:
Actually, it does. The second person you see in the mirror is a direct reflection of yourself. However, each copy of the person you would see is a rotated version, not reflected. For example, if you were to get all eight versions to face the sun, then ask them to turn left, all would turn in the same direction, causing everyone to end up looking at the next person's back.

I don't see that that makes a difference. Rotation, reflection -- the principle is the same, it's the fact that light travels in straight lines making it look as though an object is somewhere it's not, and in fact making it look like it's in multiple places at once. On the Eighth, the distance light travels between bouncing off you and hitting your eyes again is simply the distance all the way round the world at your current latitude. This makes it look like there's another of you at that distance in that direction. And because the world is so curved that its "edges" "meet" after one-eighth the distance they would if the world was flat, if you're near enough to Sun Island and high enough that your view isn't blocked by the horizon, you will see eight of yourself altogether. We can't recreate this effect in our world, but I used a mirror as an example of a similar effect. (Two mirrors at an angle of 22 1/2 degrees is closer. Then you'd see sixteen of yourself, half of them reflected, half rotated. Ignore the reflected ones, and you're not far off what you'd see on the Eighth.)

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agaricus5
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Nuntar wrote:

agaricus5 wrote:
Actually, it does. The second person you see in the mirror is a direct reflection of yourself. However, each copy of the person you would see is a rotated version, not reflected. For example, if you were to get all eight versions to face the sun, then ask them to turn left, all would turn in the same direction, causing everyone to end up looking at the next person's back.

I don't see that that makes a difference. Rotation, reflection -- the principle is the same,

It makes a big difference. Reflection; Rotation.

Ignoring the Eighth, mirror imaged objects are not superimposable on their counterparts with any rotation or translation. This is of critical importance in many topological problems, for example in chemistry and especially in biological molecules, chirality occurs because mirror image molecules do not have the same spatial properties despite being chemically identical.

On the Eighth, the distance light travels between bouncing off you and hitting your eyes again is simply the distance all the way round the world at your current latitude. This makes it look like there's another of you at that distance in that direction. And because the world is so curved that its "edges" "meet" after one-eighth the distance they would if the world was flat, if you're near enough to Sun Island and high enough that your view isn't blocked by the horizon, you will see eight of yourself altogether. We can't recreate this effect in our world, but I used a mirror as an example of a similar effect. (Two mirrors at an angle of 22 1/2 degrees is closer. Then you'd see sixteen of yourself, half of them reflected, half rotated. Ignore the reflected ones, and you're not far off what you'd see on the Eighth.)

If light bounced off slice internal edges, you would see your reflection as you look at the edge. You would also see the area in front of you reflected. Now, if you were to walk into it, it would be like walking towards a mirror, except when you walk through the boundary, you would suddenly see your reflection disappear as you translocate to the other side of the slice.

While I was writing the above, you edited your post. My answer to you now is that you have just said almost what I have said:

"Ignore the reflected ones" + "On the Eighth, the distance light travels between bouncing off you and hitting your eyes again is simply the distance all the way round the world at your current latitude" = Light that travels to the edge of the slice hits your back and then returns to you, so you end up looking at your back.

Now, assuming only a single self-wrapped slice, with the various paths that light does take as it crosses a slice "border", one would indeed see an effect akin to there being eight repeats of the slice. So technically, the two geometries (single wrapped slice, eight slices forming a disc) are interchangeable and indistinguishable, with the only difference being exactly how much mass this universe contains.

I concede that a single slice would remove the problem of having eight separate sets of energy/mass behaving identically, but you have demonstrated that the other slice images would thus be rotations and not reflections. The net effect is still that the Eighth looks more like a cylinder, not a torus, as I said above.

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[Last edited by agaricus5 at 05-08-2009 02:24 AM]

Sillyman
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No, it's definitely a torus... a cylinder does not wrap from the top to the bottom (as the Eighth does, as evidenced by fegundo behavior), and a torus and a cylinder behave exactly the same on the left and right sides.

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Tahnan
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Torus? To be a torus, the left edge would have to connect to the right edge, and the top edge to the bottom edge. Since the top edge is a point, that seems more or less impossible.

What really weirds me out is the idea of trying to circumnavigate the Eighth. You'd get back to your "starting point" after going what is, to an outside observer (overhead observer? upside observer?), an eighth of the way around the disc. But on the surface of the disc, you'd have no way at all to tell. Though if you go an eighth of the way around the disc and find yourself "home", you'd walk in the front door of a different house and greet a different spouse that some other version of you had left behind as they set out to circumnavigate...so dizzy.

Sillyman
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Tahnan wrote:
Torus? To be a torus, the left edge would have to connect to the right edge, and the top edge to the bottom edge. Since the top edge is a point, that seems more or less impossible.

And yet... it's apparently canon. IIRC: Fegundoes, when they pass through Sun Island, explode and scatter their ashes on the bottom of the map. They are the only creature that can survive (in a sense) both the fires of the sun and being exploded by a line-plane (on a map, point-line) transition.

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[Last edited by Sillyman at 05-08-2009 08:33 AM]

agaricus5
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Sillyman wrote:
No, it's definitely a torus... a cylinder does not wrap from the top to the bottom (as the Eighth does, as evidenced by fegundo behavior), and a torus and a cylinder behave exactly the same on the left and right sides.

The Eighth does not wrap from the top to the bottom (or DROD 4 might not come to pass!), but from the centre to the outer edge. If you pass through the transition line (or near enough), you end up on the outer edge of the Eighth, but at the same altitude as you started.

However, on second thought, I think I do understand what you are trying to say. What you really mean is that the Eighth is almost like an infinite series of toruses, one for each plane perpendicular to the singularity line passing through Sun Island. However, because the transition is so abrupt (everything behaves normally until that point is reached), this deforms the torus so it approximates a disc. As fegundo ash, water and energy can traverse the transition line, this line is not actually a point but a narrow cylinder (hence why a single surface plane would in fact be a torus).

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Sillyman
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Yeah, that's pretty much what I meant... or at the very least produces a similar effect... if that transition line is a very narrow cylinder rather than a line, then the surface of the Eighth is exactly topologically equivalent to a single torus... the donut shape isn't there, but north is associated with south and east with west.

If it is a line... then I don't know whether it can be called a torus or not, but that line still associates with the southern edge.

And yeah, I didn't mean up and down, I meant north and south... although... huh.

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[Last edited by Sillyman at 05-08-2009 05:09 PM]

The Architest
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I join! I just LOVE doing some graphics! Is GIF made in Game Maker good or bad?

Nuntar
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I don't know anything about Game Maker, but if it can make GIFs, that'll be fine.

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Jutt
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agaricus5 wrote:
The Eighth does not wrap from the top to the bottom [...].

If you like, read some of the info (secreted beacuse of spoilers) in this topic. I argued there that the Eighth's universe is actually a 3-torus.





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Tahnan
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agaricus5 wrote:
However, on second thought, I think I do understand what you are trying to say. What you really mean is that the Eighth is almost like an infinite series of toruses, one for each plane perpendicular to the singularity line passing through Sun Island.

i hate you i hate you i hate you ow my head

For those of us with no visualization skills, can we get a picture of...wait, probably this shouldn't even be in this topic any more. Remind me to start a thread in General.

agaricus5
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Jutt wrote:

agaricus5 wrote:
The Eighth does not wrap from the top to the bottom [...].

If you like, read some of the info (secreted beacuse of spoilers) in this topic. I argued there that the Eighth's universe is actually a 3-torus.

Actually, I'm having some trouble visualising how that would work (I'm no good with topology). How does a 3-torus account for changes in vertical altitude? Surely an infinite stack of toruses, one for each surface plane, would be more accurate?

Edit: Tahnan's right. I think we should move this off-topic discussion to this topic.

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[Last edited by agaricus5 at 05-08-2009 10:29 PM]

techant
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I had no idea that a flag contest would bring up so much deep Eighth lore, what fun...

Still so busy I haven't even started mine, that is why I could not run the contest, but I have some ideas and I hope to get an entry in. I am really looking forward to the entries.

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Bombadil
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I submitted mine. It's nothing really fancy (I suck at design and this kind of stuff) but it was fun reading about the Eighth geography.