Honsel.

I’m Allie: junior anthropologist, amateur linguist, former shovel-bum, former academic peon, former textbook designer, sometimes information architect, occasional editor, current illustrator, writer, cartoonist, typographer, and maker of over-elaborate fictional things.

The Stabellarium is my worldbuilding site, archive, notebook, wunderkammer, and ill-advised attempt to make the internet look more like Aldine incunabula. Its chief concern is the Werld: an invented setting of histories, languages, customs, calendars, maps, meals, folkways, philosophies, bureaucracies, jokes, catastrophes, and big and small human absurdities. I was once told the Werld “feels like America after being passed through historical memory enough times that nobody remembers America anymore.”

I write and draw comics, make diegetic documents, build cultures from the dirt up, and spend an unreasonable amount of time thinking about coinage, cookery, ritual, clothing, agriculture, warfare, timber-frame construction, and how ordinary people live inside impersonal systems much larger than themselves. I also post rants, essays, and niche worldbuilding tools of limited interest to anyone here.

Honestly, you can probably learn more about me from skimming my bibliography for this project than anything I can say about myself.

I’m from rural county Iowa, because, to quote that city-slicker Bill Bryson, someone had to be.

I love cats, and like to tell myself the feeling is mutual.