Sharrukin's Palace

May 2026 was a fairly productive month, although I didn’t get as much done on creative tasks as I had hoped. June is going to mark something of a transition point, as I’m finishing up the 2025-2026 academic year and getting ready for summer break.

Here’s the plan for June.

University Studies

I finished my astronomy course’s final exam back in May, and I’m reasonably confident that I passed that course with distinction. For the past few weeks I’ve been intensively “revising” for my mathematics course, especially since the final exam is 100% of the grade and I have reason to believe it will be challenging. That final takes place on 9 June, after which summer break starts and I won’t have too much to do for a few months.

The objective for June is to take the final exam for my mathematics course and score no less than 90% overall.

Therapy Writing (Fan Fiction)

I finished “Home Front” in May, and I’ve started on the next story in the series, with the working title of “The Country of Silence.” This is going to be the first of a number of stories that involve my personal take on the history of artificial intelligence and synthetic life in the Star Trek universe.

The objective for June is to complete and post “The Country of Silence.”

Architect of Worlds & Composer of Cultures

A new item that’s come up involves corrections to some of the world design for Ad Astra’s Ten Worlds setting. In particular, as I observed here, I’m working on some incremental improvements to elements of the Architect of Worlds design sequence, which we can apply to the Ten Worlds and eventually integrate into a second edition of Architect.

Meanwhile, once I’m done with my finals, finishing the new draft of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures will rise to first or second place on the priority list.

The objectives for June are:

• Produce new models for EUV-driven atmospheric escape and planetary greenhouse effect, and apply those to revisions to the Ten Worlds setting
• Finish version 0.5 of the Cultural Evolution Game for Composer of Cultures
• Contribute to the initial design for other portions of Composer of Cultures
• Continue to collect other research for a potential second edition of the book, and make occasional world-building posts to this site based on that new research

Personal Universes

I’m still focusing on my “Great Lands” Iron Age fantasy setting. I decided I wasn’t happy with the geography I was building, and chose to discard that in favor of making the setting an explicit alternate Earth – the physical geography is going to be very close to what actually existed in ancient times, even if the history and cultural geography are very different.

The next step remains construction of a revised “historical atlas” for the setting, which I can make available both on my Kofi page and on World Anvil. This remains relatively low on the priority list, but I’m making progress with it and may have some interim reports in the month of June.