Today’s TDC says:
Alphistia is a geofictional country, you can read about it on its web pages. Tell us where you think it would be, if it had a location. Who lives there? What do they do?
I cheated and asked ChatGPT:
I think Alphistia would be somewhere in northern Europe – perhaps tucked away between Scotland and Scandinavia, in a place that exists in the geographical equivalent of a gap in the map. It would have a temperate climate, plenty of rain, long summer evenings and a landscape of rolling hills, woodland, small farms and lakes. In other words, somewhere that is green rather more often than it is sunny.
It would be a small country, with no enormous cities. Instead, there would be lots of small towns and villages, each with their own character, surrounded by farmland and wilderness. I imagine the capital being more like a particularly ambitious market town than a conventional capital: a university, a library, a railway station, a few museums, lots of cafés, and a parliament which is just about large enough to be taken seriously.
Who lives there? I imagine Alphistians as people who are rather fond of making things – languages, art, music, stories, gardens, maps, bicycles, community projects and unnecessarily elaborate local traditions. They would probably be farmers, teachers, craftspeople, engineers, programmers, artists, researchers and shopkeepers, with a healthy number of people whose occupations are difficult to explain to foreigners.
I suspect Alphistians would have a slightly obsessive interest in their own history and geography. Every village would have a local museum, every hill would have a name, and everyone would have an opinion about the correct pronunciation of the name of the neighbouring village.
Perhaps most importantly, I think Alphistia would be a country where making things up is taken seriously. Not in the sense of being dishonest, but in the sense that imagination is regarded as a perfectly legitimate way of understanding the world. It would be a country for people who like maps of places that don’t exist, languages that nobody else speaks, and the possibility that somewhere, just over the horizon, there might be another country waiting to be invented.
