04/28/2025
I’m starting a set of notes that cover my work and thoughts. Informal stream of consciousness stuff although I don’t want to be rigid on the format. There’s a lot I’m constantly iterating on and I haven’t put much of it out there. Most of my work goes into space work but I want to make a commitment to bring this place to life. I’ll follow up with more in the near future but let me get through one post to get this going.
04/28/2025
The Traveler and the Lost Tribes of Florida is a recreation of one of the only known accounts of the indigenous tribes that inhabited Florida in 1500s. A young traveler from Cartagena, Colombia named Hernando Escalante Fontaneda was embarked on a journey to study in Salamanca, Spain with his brother. On his way through Cuba, a violent storm capsized their ship and they floated to the coast of Florida.
The project uses Unreal Engine to reconstruct the Florida of the 1500s and the known literature of the tribes that lived there. You play as Hernando Escalante Fontaneda exploring Florida and interacting with its people. I’ve used AI to reassemble the lost language of these tribes based on Julian Granberry’s forensic linguistic knowledge and dialects of the region.
Escalante’s journey was one in search of Ponce de Leon’s Fountain of Youth and is such yours in this historical finderscape.